Auschwitz: Cell Blocks 10 and 11

Photo above: View from Cell Block 11 towards Cell Block 10 at the original Auschwitz prison facility in Poland. Photo by Eric Francis, taken Sept. 27, 2006.

[Editor’s Note: This article was originally published Oct. 6, 2006. For a more detailed introduction to this series, please see this link. The approximately eight articles and 15 photos in this series will be published evenings at about 6 pm Eastern Time.]

YOU HAVE TO HAND IT to the Nutzies: they really were evil, possessed by evil and devoted to its full expression. They were more devoted to evil than the Beatles were to music, and they were more prolific. Not surprisingly, we prefer to remember the Beatles. The Nazis are now a joke or a clichГ©. They are a bunch of movie characters without names. If you mention them, you must be ignorant, an alarmist, a gun collector or a film buff. Besides, it was so long ago; our parents were only kids.

If you take a look at what happened in Germany and Europe between 1933 and 1945, it’s really pretty shocking. Any public library will have a dozen books on the shelf, though I wonder who reads them. Librarians know what happened. Yet no matter how much we may look at them in astonishment, the ordinary people of that era who let it go on, who knew and looked away, are, to me, stranger still. Perhaps we have some reckoning to do with the awesome power of fear, of denial, of elective ignorance.

Tell me: when was the last time you said anything to anyone about the rendition and torture flights conducted by the United States all across Europe the past five years? How many times have you discussed with your friends the American torture center at Guantanamo Bay? I truly hope your answers were ‘recently’ and ‘often’.

Could you bring it up at a dinner party?

I concede, it’s impolite. I am uncomfortable doing it myself. Mentioning torture at dinner spoils the fun — and there must be something wrong with you. And who knows if it’s really true? The media always lie, right?

But could it be that so many people believe that Muslims are a problem, that they are inherently evil, that they are terrorists, and that they are ‘against our way of life’, that it’s more convenient to shut up than speak on their behalf? Maybe you don’t like how they’re being treated (imprisoned, bombed and tortured), but maybe some of them are bad people, right? If you speak up, then you can be accused of being soft on terrorism. Welcome to Nazi reasoning. They did not invent it — like a lot of things, they just perfected it.

The core of Nazi evil expressed itself in Cell Blocks 10 and 11 at Auschwitz, camp 1. Some of the planning and thinking went on elsewhere; the ecology of anti-Semitism within which it festered was to some extent resident in many millions of people, and deeply rooted in old cultural attitudes. But the actual expression of the worst atrocities and the thoughts lurking behind them found their true home in Cell Blocks 10 and 11. These were the working prototype. These were the place the model was created, for everything from sexual experimentation to gassing hundreds of people at a time.

The photo above is what you might have seen in your last moments of life if you were imprisoned in Cell Block 11, the Death Block. You might have meditated on this view for some days, but probably not long, and miserably; those in Block 11 were beaten and tortured regularly, and like in the rest of Auschwitz, they were hungry, tired and sick. Interestingly, the Death Block includes a room that was used as a ‘court’ where sham military trials were held and people were condemned for various rationales. This got me angrier than any of the torture cells I saw. It’s why you want your country to have real, civilian courts and actual trial by jury. It’s why you want to have judges who are not appointed for their political stances but rather for their fairness and experience. True, it’s accused criminals who get those trials, but you never know — you could be one of them some day. Even my dad, a professor who worked as a consultant to police administrators for many years, was arrested once. The charge was dropped. It was ridiculous, but there he was — facing the same bullshit as everyone else.

So that little fake Auschwitz courtroom — I would love to have smashed the place up. It was the room where the Nazis helped themselves feel better about what they were doing, condemning the innocent to death.

Several thousand people were killed in the yard outside this window, which we will visit tomorrow. Most were shot, many were hung by the arms and allowed to die slowly as they helplessly watched others be executed.

Further down the corridor, to the right of where this photo was taken, is a women’s undressing room, with a toilet, where women undressed and went to their deaths one or a few at a time, stepped outside, faced a special wall, and were shot from behind. I did not see a corresponding room for men, but I am sure it’s there somewhere. The Nazis had a morbid fascination with sex and nudity. Was it really necessary to shoot their victims naked? In their minds, yes. In part it contributed to the necessary belief that the victims were not human — an idea perpetuated so fully that many upon whom it was projected apparently accepted it themselves. Many who survived the camps say that keeping their sense of humanity intact was how they did it.

In the basement of Block 11 were something called ‘standing cells’, little brick cubicles where prisoners were forced to stand up for extended periods of time, sometimes all night, and even for days on end, sometimes till they died. Across the basement corridor was the test gas chamber where Zyclon B was tested on 600 prisoners, the first mass gassing at Auschwitz and, say the museums notes, the first time in the history of the German Reich. Also in the basement were suffocation cells, where prisoners were placed, in the dark, until the oxygen slowly ran out. If you tried to help someone escape, the punishment was death in a starvation cell. No form of murder was left out of the question. They were all interesting to the Nazis and there were plenty of people coming in every day to experiment on.

In this photo, you are looking from the main corridor on the first floor, through a cell, and across the courtyard. The black fixture on the building across the courtyard is one of the blinded windows of Block 10, which was a special ward for gynecological torture. The blinds were put up so that the ‘patients’ in the that block could not see the continuously ongoing executions and torture in the yard outside their window.

Who were those patients? I suggest considering they may have been Hlawica Zdenka and Holan Adalberta, the women whose pictures we began with. Those in Block 10 met a more sinister fate than their neighbors. There, Prof. Dr. Carl Clauberg conducted sterilization experiments on women of ‘undesirable’ races and nationalities. Make no mistake: this is where racism and prejudice lead. This is the logical conclusion.

The methods of sterilization included the extremely painful injection of caustic chemicals into the uterus, and use of X-rays. Those to whom this was done were usually too sick to recover, and were killed with an injection of a chemical called phenol to the heart. This is from the Wikipedia entry on Clauberg, who was actually turned free for a time in West Germany after the war, but later arrested:

Clauberg looked for an easy and cheap way to sterilize women. He injected liquid acid into their uterus – without anesthetics. Most of his test subjects were Jewish or Roma women who suffered permanent damage and serious infections. Damaged ovaries were then removed and sent to Berlin for additional research. Sometimes subjects were bombarded with x-rays. Some of the subjects died because of the tests, and others were killed so they could be autopsied. Estimates of those who survived but were sterilized are around 700.

According to Baruch Cohen: “Block 10 was made up of mostly married women between the ages of 20 and 40, preferably those who had not borne children. There was a constant fear in Block 10 of being killed, sterilized, or inseminated by Clauberg. He would often tease the female prisoners that they would all undergo sexual intercourse with a male prisoner chosen especially for this purpose. At least one of the Orthodox Jewish women who heard that Clauberg selected her to be a Block 10 prostitute decided to poison herself. After he inseminated the women, Clauberg would often taunt the strapped-in women by stating that he had inseminated their wombs with animal sperm and that monsters were growing in their wombs….”

The Nazis perfected this kind of conduct, but the Americans are excellent copycats. Personally, I find the ongoing silence of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal to be as frightening as anything I’ve ever encountered in a few decades of considering Nazi atrocities. We don’t really know what’s going on inside these extra-legal prisons, but we have a clue. (Did you ever wonder why Guantanamo is on the island of our supposed communist enemy, Cuba? Because it’s outside the reach of legitimate American constitutional law and lawyers — for a good reason.)

And to think: if you’re an American, you pay the salary of Donald Rumsfeld, you pay for Abu Ghraib, you pay for Guantanamo. These things always start small, and are directed at the obvious villainized enemy.

As Americans, Europeans, Brits or Australians, we are used to calling a lawyer when we have legal problems. If we get arrested for something like DUI, pot, shoplifting, protesting or writing an article, we can get bailed out and then have some semblance of a judicial hearing. If your case is interesting, it gets in the newspaper, and that helps a heck of a lot. But we really should stop to consider just what it is that keeps that system in place — and how fragile it is, and how subject to being rendered meaningless or nonexistent by fear and hatred.

Finally, I leave you a question: What is the relationship between Janet Jackson’s breast and the second photo down, at this next link?

Wiki on Abu Ghraib Prisoner Abuse

…on Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray

…on Dr. Carl Clauberg

Photo above: Exterior view of Block 10, the gynecological torture ward. The blinds were placed there so that inmates could not witness executions in the torture yard outside. This building is not open to the public. Man in image is my driver, Arthur.

Photo above: “Standing cells” in the basement of Block 11, where prisoners were forced to stand up, four at a time, overnight or for days on end.

Photo above: Part of the inscription from above the entrance to Auschwitz, which translates to “Work makes one free.”