"Work makes you free"

THE THIEVES CAME BETWEEN 3:30 and 5:00 this morning. Somehow they cut a gap through the fence and circumvented the guards without being seen or heard. The four meter long sign was impossible to miss – it spelled out the words Arbeit macht frei and could be seen from a considerable distance. Working fast, they unscrewed it from above the gate where it had hung for nearly seventy years, loaded it onto a waiting vehicle and made off with it before anyone knew what had hit them. Now the theft of a sign is always trouble, but it becomes an international incident when the place from which it was stolen is called Oswiecim – better known to the outside world as Auschwitz.

World reaction has been fierce. Poland’s deputy foreign minister Andrzej Kremer spoke of a “shocking act,” since the sign “is the key symbol of this concentration camp.” Israel’s vice prime minister Silvan Shalom spoke of “an appalling deed” that represented a “desecration” of this historic site. Avner Shalev, president of the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, called the theft an attack on memory and “an escalation of those elements that would like to lead us back to darker days.”  However, former president Lech Walesa has suggested that the theft is “a criminal act” rather than a political action. But so far, the police have no leads. The Polish state has posted a reward of 5,000 Zloty (1,200 Euros) for information that could lead to the apprehension of the perpetrators.

But why did the Nazis install such a bizarre sign in the first place instead of a more honest statement, such as "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"? In fact, the sign's striking irony drives home both the horror and the perverted idealism of the Nazis’ reign of terror in Europe from 1933 to 1945. And nowhere did horror and perverted idealism coexist more intimately than in Auschwitz.

The Auschwitz concentration camp was constructed on orders from SS leader Heinrich Himmler beginning in March, 1940, nine months following the German invasion of Poland. While it was originally designed as a detention and labor camp for Polish political prisoners, a year later Himmler ordered the construction of a new camp nearby, the infamous Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp, which would become the scene of mass killings of Jews, communists, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, and other so-called “subhumans” who had no place in the new order the Nazis planned for Europe and the world. A total of 1.1 million persons are believed to have perished there through the application of gas, executions, disease, starvation, overwork and exposure before the Red Army liberated what was left of its inmates in January of 1945. It has served as a memorial ever since.

Genocide as a "test of character":
Prisoners from an SS Sonderkommando burn corpses in open
pits at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp

Polish workers manufactured the sign on Himmler’s orders around six months following the construction of the camp. Similar signs had already been placed on the gates of other Nazi concentration camps. (Only the Buchenwald camp displayed the slogan “Jedem das seine” – “To each his own”) While “Work makes you free” does indeed sound like the darkest kind of cynicism, it actually represented the very essence of the “virtues” the SS held dearest. However, these virtues had little to do with how earlier and subsequent generations defined the term and today highlight the pseudo-Nietzschean “re-evaluation of values” that was the hallmark of the Nazi mindset. As historian Robert Gerwarth writes in his upcoming biography of SD leader Reinhard Heydrich:

It was Himmler’s intention that such ideals such as ‘honour’, ‘loyalty’, ‘obedience’, ‘decency’ and ‘comraderie’ should determine the behaviour of his SS men. Drawn from the standard vocabulary of authoritarian movements, these terms gained their special meaning from the fact that they had been deprived of their original content. For the SS, ‘loyalty’ referred solely to their relationship with Adolf Hitler. Closely linked to the concept of loyalty was the notion of honour. Loyalty formed the core of a special honour code that distinguished SS members from the rest of humanity. Breach of loyalty was the gravest offence an SS man could commit and was on a par with the loss of honour. ‘Comraderie’ bound the order together and made it into a unit in which, according to Himmler’s will, there were to be no more conflicts and petty jealousies.

 
"Remaining decent":
SS leader Heinrich Himmler (1900-45)

This is why Himmler could state the following at a speech before SS members in Posen in 1943 and solemnly believe every word of it:

The Jewish people are being exterminated. It is in our program, removing the Jews, exterminating them. But most of us know what it really means when a hundred corpses are lying on the ground together, when there are five hundred or a thousand lying there. To have gone through this and to have remained decent – apart from exceptions due to human weakness – this is what has made us tough. But overall we can say that we have carried out this most arduous duty out of love for our people. We have not been harmed in doing so in our inmost being, in our soul, in our character.

Thus mass murder was transformed into the highest virtue, and the victims perished for their own and everyone else’s good. As Adolf Hitler himself once wrote: When I defend myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. You could say – and Himmler would likely have agreed – that the Nazis had to exterminate Europe in order to save it.

The Dachau concentration camp near Munich displayed this slogan from the pen of Himmler himself: There is only one path to freedom; its milestones are: obedience, diligence, order, cleanliness, honesty, truthfulness, sobriety, sacrifice and love of the Fatherland. But ordinary SS camp guards weren't buying any of it. Yes, there was indeed just one path to freedom, they used to tell incoming prisoners, but it didn’t go the route that their lilly-livered boss had imagined for himself. It went straight up.

Through the chimney.