A letter from Auschwitz

Great Debates
1

Hey everyone,

So I got entangled with a Holocaust denier. Yeah, I know…bad idea.

Anyway, I’m trying to refute his points about the camps having amenities like swimming pools and money and the like, but he’s claimed one thing that I can’t find any direct refutation or explanation of.

This letter, apparently, is of an Auschwitz inmate to a friend outside, claiming they are in good health and doing well.

So why would the Nazis permit a letter like this to go out?

I can recognise all sorts of reasons (such as a special privilege to a favoured inmate, or the letter being heavily doctored, or even a forgery, or taken out of context), but it’s one that I can’t definitively dismiss.

Has anyone got any helpful directions or explanations as to why the Nazis would permit this, and was it a normal thing for inmates?

2

Why wouldn’t the Nazis permit such a letter to go out? Assuming this letter really was sent out by an inmate in Auschwitz, the only thing this might prove is that some person at some point in Auschwitz believed (or wrote as if he believed) that things were going okay. That shouldn’t be surprising based on the numbers alone.

3

Why would the Nazis not want a letter to go out saying everything was wonderful? Why would they not want a letter to go out soliciting gifts which they could confiscate on arrival. Why would a prisoner cooperate with the Nazis? To stay alive, of course.

4

A letter such as this doesn’t add up to anything as far as evidence that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

There is, of course, a mountain of evidence in the form of photographs, records, and eyewitness accounts (and more) that the Nazis planned to kill all the Jews of Europe and succeeded in killing ~6 million of them. Some of the most damning are the recordings of speeches by Heinrich Himmler, including the following:

I ask of you that that which I say to you in this circle be really only heard and not ever discussed. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth. For the organisation which had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had. […] I felt obliged to you, as the most superior dignitary, as the most superior dignitary of the party, this political order, this political instrument of the Führer, to also speak about this question quite openly and to say how it has been. The Jewish question in the countries that we occupy will be solved by the end of this year. Only remainders of odd Jews that managed to find hiding places will be left over.

Also:

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It’s one of those things that is easily said: ‘The Jewish people are being exterminated’, says every party member, ‘this is very obvious, it’s in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, we’re doing it, hah, a small matter.’ And then they turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swines, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. Because we know how difficult it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rabble-rousers in every city, what with the bombings, with the burden and with the hardships of the war. If the Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely arrive now at the state we were at in 1916 and 17 […]

If you insist on continuing your interaction with the denier, see what he has to say about Himmler’s own words.

5

I suspect the denier’s ‘point’ is something on the lines of, why would Nazis intent on murdering a people be interested in letter them tell their loved ones they are okay.

I refuted the ‘there were shops and swimming pools’ claim with the point that they were for the guards and for inmates willing to ‘manage’ their fellows in exchange for special privileges, and suspected this was on a similar vein.

6

Hmmm.

Can you ask him how he reconciles this?

7

Sending parcels isn’t permitted, but receiving is?

8

I’m pretty sure soldiers, from every war from the beginning of time, wrote home that things weren’t too bad, and it was going to be okay. So their Mom/wife/child wouldn’t worry.

This seems a most obvious explanation, to me.

9

Largely because they lied about it from beginning to end and getting others to lie on their behalf about the nature of the camps was in their interests. The reason is obvious; victims are more easily rounded up and subsequently murdered if they don’t know that certain death awaits them. In the Aktion T4 program, murdering the disabled, relatives were told that they had died of infectious disease. In the Final Solution euphemisms abound at even the highest levels; Jews weren’t exterminated, they were ‘evacuated’. They weren’t being murdered en masse, they were ‘resettled in the east’.

They maintained the lies right to the end, Jews weren’t being herded into gas chambers but taking a shower. One of the commandants of Treblinka was fired because he did such a poor job of concealing the camp’s true purpose, camps were supposed to look like just a temporary transit station on the rail journey, the aforementioned Treblinka having fake timetables and ticket stands.

So lies, upon lies, upon lies, all designed to make the process of extermination easier, so that the victims and those who would sympathise with the victims would not resist to the last.

10

That makes sense. I know of course this person’s a loon and arguing in bad faith, but Someone on the Internet is Wrong.

11

“Let” it go out? I would almost expect the Nazis to send out thousands of this sort of thing (or forgeries of similar letters).
Here, we’re going to brutally murder you and everyone related to you, but we don’t want them to know we’re coming for them, so let’s send out a message telling them that you are having a wonderful time at your summer camp.

12

Well there’s wrong and then there’s holocaust denial wrong, the level of reality warping one has to engage in and the mountains of evidence one has to ignore…you might as well be arguing will someone who says that D-Day never occurred, or that Germany never invaded the Soviet Union.

You might also try looking up Theresienstadt, which is basically your letter on a large scale. The Nazis invited the Red Cross to tour it and used it as a ‘show ghetto’ to deceive people about what was happening in their camps. They even made a film, “A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area”, although the war’s end meant that it was never shown.

On Auschwitz itself commandant Hoess testified after the war on the deceptions and secrecy involved.

13

Ask him how does the existence of swimming pools or any amenities prove the falsehood of the Holocaust.

In real life the Germans executed people for mistreating inmates, sans authorisation to do so. Does that prove the Holocaust did not happen. Obviously not, just shows that even the Germans of 1933-1945 were of the opinion that well, proper procedure had to be followed.

14

It’s pretty well known that many new arrivals as Auschwitz were forced to write letters home saying nice things before being killed. By the time their relatives got these letters the writers were long dead. But the letters served to make the population which was yet to be deported more compliant and more sanguine about the prospect.

15

I honestly didn’t know this, do you have a link I can smack round his ear?

16

I can think of several possibilities.

  1. This is a forgery created by postwar Holocaust deniers.
  2. This is a wartime forgery created by the Nazis.
  3. The guy knew the Nazis were reading his mail so he lied and said what they wanted him to say.
  4. The guy lied and claimed everything was okay because he knew there wasn’t anything his family could do and he didn’t want them to be burdened with worry.
  5. The guy had told his family his mail would be read by the Nazis so he hid certain code phrases in the message to tell them what was really going on.

So there are a number of possibilities that show this letter doesn’t disprove the overwhelming amount of evidence that proves the Holocaust was real.

17

I would imagine there are any number of references to this all over the net - as I said this is pretty well known. A brief Google search turned up A car order for SS-Untersturmführer Hartenberger from RSHA to visit Auschwitz subcamps for the “writing letter action”. Jewish prisoners were forced to write letters containing a standard formula “I am well and I feel all right”. (I’m not sure what the term “car order” means in context, and I also don’t speak much German so can’t verify what the document contains, but you get the picture.)

See also: BBC ON THIS DAY | 27 | 1945: Auschwitz death camp liberated

18

I don’t know anything about this person who wrote the letter, but the fact that he could write German, and so, apparently, could his family (not that unusual if he was from what is now the Czech Republic-- most Jews in Auschwitz were from Poland), makes me wonder if he was a Kapo, a Jew in a position of power in the camps, like when a slave on a plantation would be elevated to a position of overseer over other slaves. Kapos had a lot of privileges, and got a lot more to eat, as well as clean clothes (no lice, so no typhus, which was a major cause of death in the camps). A Kapo didn’t have the same life as an ordinary prisoner, and compared to regular prisoners, was, in fact, “doing well.”

I’m just speculating, but the fact that the letter survived meant that the family was probably special in some way. I can’t imagine the Nazis having the family’s address, and just letting them continue to live there, and not go and immediately arrest them.

Or maybe Josef Novy wasn’t Jewish. It’s a Czech name that’s a variation of Novak, and is often a Jewish name, but it doesn’t have to be. If he was Czech, he could have been a captured deserter, or a dissident, but he probably still would have been treated better than a Jew, especially since he knew German.

19

Found a passage in Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust which mentions letter writing; p.657-658.
"At Birkenau, one group of deportees had not only been kept alive, but whole familes had been kept together in a special family camp. These were some 3,860 Czech Jews, survivors of the 5,000 Jews who had been brought to Birkenau from Theresienstadt six months earlier. At the beginning of March they were visited by a German Red Cross delegation which was not allowed to see the rest of Birkenau. Then, on March 3, the inmates of the family camp were told to write postcards to their relatives who were still in Czechoslovakia, saying that they were alive, well, and working. They were also made to date the postcards March 25, 26, or 27, and to ask their relatives to send them food parcels."

They were gassed four days later.

20

I don’t know why anyone would not immediately assume it was written at gunpoint.