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Lessons we should have learned from the liberation of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps

It's been more than 75 years since the last prisoners were freed from Auschwitz. The farther we get from that chapter, the more important it is to focus on the lessons it taught us, lest we ignore the signs of history repeating itself.

Photo by Jean Carlo Emer on Unsplash

From 1940 to 1945, an estimated 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz, the largest complex of Nazi concentration camps. More than four out of five of those people—at least 1.1 million people—were murdered there.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet forces liberated the final prisoners from these camps—7,000 people, most of whom were sick or dying. Those of us with a decent public education are familiar with at least a few names of Nazi extermination facilities—Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen—but these are merely a few of the thousands (yes, thousands) of concentration camps, sub camps, and ghettos spread across Europe where Jews and other targets of Hitler's regime were persecuted, tortured, and killed by the millions.

The scale of the atrocity is unfathomable. Like slavery, the Holocaust is a piece of history where the more you learn the more horrifying it becomes. The inhumane depravity of the perpetrators and the gut-wrenching suffering of the victims defies description. It almost becomes too much for the mind and heart to take in, but it's vital that we push through that resistance.

The liberation of the Nazi camps marked the end of Hitler's attempt at ethnic cleansing, and the beginning of humanity's awareness about how such a heinous chapter in human history took place. The farther we get from that chapter, the more important it is to focus on the lessons it taught us, lest we ignore the signs of history repeating itself.

Lesson 1: Unspeakable evil can be institutionalized on a massive scale

Perhaps the most jarring thing about the Holocaust is how systematized it was. We're not talking about humans slaying other humans in a fit of rage or a small number of twisted individuals torturing people in a basement someplace—this was a structured, calculated, disciplined, and meticulously planned and carried out effort to exterminate masses of people. The Nazi regime built a well-oiled killing machine the size of half a continent, and it worked exactly as intended. We often cite the number of people killed, but the number of people who partook in the systematic torture and destruction of millions of people is just as harrowing.

It has now come out that Allied forces knew about the mass killing of Jews as early as 1942—three years before the end of the war. And obviously, there were reports from individuals of what was happening from the very beginning. People often ask why more wasn't done earlier on if people knew, and there are undoubtedly political reasons for that. But we also have the benefit of hindsight in asking that question. I can imagine most people simply disbelieving what was actually taking place because it sounds so utterly unbelievable.

The lesson here is that we have to question our tendency to disbelieve things that sound too horrible to be true. We have evidence that the worst things imaginable on a scale that seems unfathomable are totally plausible.

Lesson 2: Atrocity can happen right under our noses as we go about our daily lives

One thing that struck me as I was reading about the liberation of Auschwitz is that it was a mere 37 miles from Krakow, one of the largest cities in Poland. This camp where an average of 500 people a day were killed, where bodies were piled up like corded wood, where men, women, and children were herded into gas chambers—and it was not that far from a major population center.

And that was just one set of camps. We now know that there were thousands of locations where the Nazis carried out their "final solution," and it's not like they always did it way out in the middle of nowhere. A New York Times report on how many more camps there were than scholars originally thought describes what was happening to Jews and marginalized people as the average person went about their daily lives:

"The documented camps include not only 'killing centers' but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named 'care' centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel."

Whether or not the average person knew the full extent of what was happening is unclear. But surely there were reports. And we know how the average person responds to reports, even today in our own country.

How many news stories have we seen of abuses and inhumane conditions inside U.S. immigrant detention camps? What is our reaction when the United Nations human rights chief visits our detention facilities and comes away "appalled"? It's a natural tendency to assume things simply can't be that bad—that's undoubtedly what millions of Germans thought as well when stories leaked through the propaganda.

Lesson 3: Propaganda works incredibly well

Propaganda has always been a part of governance, as leaders try to sway the general populace to support whatever they are doing. But the Nazis perfected the art and science of propaganda, shamelessly playing on people's prejudices and fears and flooding the public with mountains of it.

Hermann Goering, one of Hitler's top political and military figures, explained in an interview late in his life that such manipulation of the masses isn't even that hard.

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders," he said. "That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Terrifyingly true, isn't it? This is why we have to stay vigilant in the face of fear-mongering rhetoric coming from our leaders. When an entire religion or nationality or ethnic group is painted as "dangerous" or "criminal" or "terrorists," we have to recognize that we are being exposed to the same propaganda used to convince Germans that the Nazis were just trying to protect them. Safety and security are powerful human desires that make it easy to justify horrible acts.

Hitler was also great at playing the victim. While marching through Europe, conquering countries and rounding up millions of innocent people to exterminate, he claimed that Germany was the one under attack. Blatant anti-Semitic rhetoric surely fired up Hitler's core supporters, but the message to the average German was that this was all being done in the name of protecting the homeland, rather than a quest for a world-dominating master race.

Lesson 4: Most of us are in greater danger of committing a holocaust than being a victim of one

I had to pause when this realization hit me one day. As fairly average white American, I am in the majority in my country. And as strange as it is to say, that means I have more in common with the Germans who either committed heinous acts or capitulated to the Nazis than I do with the Jews and other targets of the Nazi party. That isn't to say that I would easily go along with mass genocide, but who's to say that I could fully resist the combination of systematic dehumanization, propaganda, and terrorism that led to the Holocaust? We all like to think we'd be the brave heroes hiding the Anne Franks of the world in our secret cupboards, but the truth is we don't really know what we would have done.

Check out what this Army Captain who helped liberate a Nazi camp said about his bafflement at what the Germans, "a cultured people" allowed to happen:

"I had studied German literature while an undergraduate at Harvard College. I knew about the culture of the German people and I could not, could not really believe that this was happening in this day and age; that in the twentieth century a cultured people like the Germans would undertake something like this. It was just beyond our imagination... – Captain (Dr.) Philip Leif - 3rd Auxiliary Surgical Group, First Army

Some say that we can gauge what we would have done by examining what we're doing right now, and perhaps they are right. Are we speaking out against our government's cruel family separations that traumatize innocent children? Do we justify travel bans from entire countries because we trust that it's simply our leadership trying to keep us safe? Do we buy into the "Muslims are terrorists" and "undocumented immigrants are criminals" rhetoric?

While it's wise to be wary of comparing current events to the Holocaust, it's also wise to recognize that the Holocaust didn't start with gas chambers. It started with "othering," scapegoating, and fear-mongering. We have to be watchful not only for signs of atrocity, but for the signs leading up to it.

Lesson 5: Teaching full and accurate history matters

There are people who deny that the Holocaust even happened, which is mind-boggling. But there are far more people who are ignorant to the true horrors of it. Reading first-hand accounts of both the people who survived the camps and those who liberated them is perhaps the best way to begin to grasp the scope of what happened.

One small example is Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower's attempt to describe what he saw when he visited Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald:

"The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'"

And of course, the most important narratives to read and try to digest are the accounts of those who survived the camps. Today, 200 survivors of Auschwitz gathered to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its liberation. They warned about the rise in anti-Semitism in the world and how we must not let prejudice and hatred fester. Imagine having to make such a warning seven decades after watching family and friends being slaughtered in front of you.

Let's use this anniversary as an opportunity to dive deeper into what circumstances and environment enabled millions of people to be killed by one country's leadership. Let's learn the lessons the Holocaust has to teach us about human nature and our place in the creation of history. And let's make darn sure we do everything in our power to fend off the forces that threaten to lead us down a similarly perilous path.


This article originally appeared on 01.27.20

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Panoramic 'tour' of Auschwitz helps us see the massiveness of the largest Nazi death camp

Auschwitz Memorial/Twitter

When I interviewed 91-year-old Holocaust survivor Ben Lesser a few months ago, I was blown away by his story. I also felt dismayed hearing him explain how Holocaust education is sorely lacking in so many places. Right around the time of our interview, a report came out that our younger generations have a shockingly woeful understanding of the Holocaust. Nearly two-thirds of Millennials and Gen Z participants in a 50-state survey didn't know that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis. Nearly half couldn't name a single concentration camp.

If we lose that history, we are less likely to recognize when the precursors to such atrocities repeat themselves. Additionally, the victims and families of victims of the millions of men, women, and children who were systematically tortured and killed in the 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos established during WWII deserve to have their experiences remembered and acknowledged.

The largest Nazi camp complex was Auschwitz, which included concentration, extermination, and forced-labor camps. Of the estimated 1.3 million people who were sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died there between 1940 and 1945. Nearly five years, and more than a million people murdered in just one camp complex. The statistics alone are mind-blowing.

Such large numbers are hard to wrap our minds around. That's why individual stories like Ben Lesser's matter so much. He himself is an Auschwitz survivor, and his descriptions of what he experienced there are difficult but important to hear.

But what makes the Holocaust especially chilling is the premeditated, factory-like automation of the killing. Camps like Auschwitz were built for the purpose of exterminating as many human beings as possible as efficiently as possible. Men, women, and children crammed into cattle cars like sardines. Men, women, and children stripped and shaven. Nazi soldiers making split second decisions of who was strong and healthy enough to be worked to death and who would be marched straight to the gas chambers.

While individual stories are vital, so are broader visuals that help us understand the scope of what took place. Perhaps paradoxically, some of the most powerful visuals from the Holocaust don't include people themselves. I remember the first time I saw a photo of an enormous pile of shoes from a concentration camp—there must have been thousands of them. That image stuck with me more than any other when I was first learning about the Holocaust. Each pair of shoes belonged to a person, and seeing them systematically yet carelessly tossed into a huge heap encapsulated the inhumanity that kept piling up as Nazi killings kept going and going.

Those who have visited Auschwitz remark about the size of the place—how it keeps going and going and going—but that's hard to capture in photographs. Thankfully, the Auschwitz Museum has an educational tool for those of us who haven't been there to get a sense of the scale of it—a panoramic, interactive tour of the grounds.

The panoramic tool lets you click arrows to move around the grounds, where you see row after row of buildings, some of which still stand and others where you can only see parts of the brick and chimneys. There's a "read more" link in each area that describes a bit about what you're seeing. You can click the link in the tweet or go here to take the interactive tour.

The Auschwitz Memorial Twitter account used the word "impressive" to describe the size of the grounds, which feels like a bit of an odd word choice, but the scope and size of it really is incredible. Imagine the resources that went into creating this place, solely dedicated to destruction and dehumanization. Imagine the number of people it took to run it, to go along with a plan so heinous and horrific that we consider it one of the very worst chapters in human history.

And it really wasn't that long ago. I recently spoke to a living, breathing human being who was taken to this place by train, who watched his siblings' incinerated ashes fall from the sky there, who barely survived the of savagery and genocide that took place on that soil.

As difficult as it is to digest, we need to learn everything we can about the Holocaust. We need to understand that such atrocity happened in one of the most advanced, cultured societies at the time. We need to see what led up to it, how propaganda and prejudice fueled it, how people allowed it to happen. We need to know what hatred can lead to—not just on an individual level, but on a mass scale.

We need to look at the entire Holocaust epic, learn how it played out in all its systematic horror, and vow—continually—to never allow ourselves to even flirt with the opening act.

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Holocaust survivor uses banknote clue to find the family of 'kind' soldier who liberated her

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In 1945, Lily Ebert, now 90, was liberated from a German munitions factory where she worked as slave labor after being transferred from the Auschwitz death camp.

A few weeks after being liberated, an American soldier shared some words of positivity with her, "The start to a new life. Good luck and happiness," he wrote on a German banknote.

The simple gesture was life-changing for Ebert and the banknote became one of her most treasured keepsakes.

"This soldier was the first human being who was kind to us," she told NBC News. "It was the first time after this terrible life that somebody was kind and I knew that somebody wants to help."


Lily Ebert is the woman with the soldier's arm around her.via Dov Forman / Twitter

Ebert's mother, brother, and sister were all killed at Auschwitz. Her two younger sisters were liberated with her at the munitions factory. She believes that she survived the ordeal due to her responsibility to take care of her sisters.

"I promised myself that if I survived by some miracle, I would tell the world what happened there," Ebert said. "The next generation and next generations should know the story so that something like that should not be repeated to any human being ever."

Ebert kept the banknote in a photo album at her home in London where it was discovered by her great-grandson, 16-year-old Dov Forman. Forman had taken it upon himself to start documenting his great-grandmother's stories as a survivor so they would never be forgotten.

"My great-grandma obviously isn't going to be around forever and her story will eventually become my whole family's responsibility to carry on," Forman said.

Intrigued by the transcription on the banknote, Foreman tweeted out a photo of the bill along with photographs of the unknown soldier and Ebert taken a few days after liberation.

The only clue to the man's identity was an inscription on the banknote that reads: "Assistant to Chaplain Schacter."

The "Chaplain Schacter" eluded to on the bill was Chaplain Herschel Schacter, an American Orthodox rabbi who served as a chaplain in the Third Army's VIII Corps. Schacter participated in the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp and helped relocate survivors, including Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.

The tweet went viral and Forman received responses from all over the world. Eventually, he learned the identity of the solider, Private Hyman Shulman from New Jersey.

In late 1944, Shulman was removed from the front lines after being injured in the Battle of the Bulge and assigned to to serve as Assistant to the Jewish Chaplain to the US Army, Rabbi Herschel Schachter.

Unfortunately, Shulman died seven years ago at the age of 91.

However, Forman was able to locate and contact Schulman's children in New York and bring the families together digitally through Zoom. "It was really special. It felt like we were family, we just clicked," Forman said.

Image: Lilly Ebert and Dov Forman (right) hold a Zoom call with Arlene and Jason Schulman, descendants of the American GI that liberated Lilly during the war, along with Lilly's daughter and husband Bilha and Julian Weider.via Dov Foreman

"I know that this soldier told his family, he wrote to his family every day the stories that he saw," Ebert said. "With that, I feel some connection to them."

Shulman wrote over 1100 letters home during the war. Some of them are archived at POBA.

The families re planning another Zoom call soon and have discussed meeting in person when coronavirus travel restrictions are lifted.

"I hope one day that I will meet them personally, I would very much like to have that," Ebert said.

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This Nazi was lying about his role at Auschwitz. Here's the technology that caught him.

Virtual reality can be super cool — and it's bringing bad guys to justice.

About 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

In what is one of the largest genocides in history, millions of people perished, went through extreme trauma, and lost entire families at the hands of Nazi soldiers.

Photo by Jerry Lampen/AFP/Getty Images.

And for decades after the Nuremberg Trials, most were never prosecuted.

The Holocaust ended in 1945, coinciding with the end of World War II. Many Nazi soldiers returned unpunished to society, and in many cases, have since passed away. In an effort to bring about justice for Holocaust victims, lawyers have been searching for lower-ranking officials that would have been in their late-teens and early-20s during the Holocaust. However, because most concentration camps were destroyed at the end of the war, it's been especially challenging for courts to prove any guilt.

In "Nazi VR," human rights lawyers describe these challenges. “So many got away, living in peace in their houses in post-war Germany, that we can’t really be satisfied,” said Jens Rommel, a German lawyer and prosecutor who heads the Central Office of the National Judicial Authorities for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. As war crimes experts race against time to track down soldiers who were involved, lawyers like Rommel have struggled to determine ways to create opportunities for justice.

Photo by Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty Images.

But thanks to virtual reality technology, justice is finally being served.

When lawyers charged Reinhold Hanning with participating in war crimes, the former SS guard claimed to have not been aware of what was happening inside the concentration camps. At 18 years old, Hanning started working as an SS guard at Auschwitz, one of the most notorious concentration camps that was the site of 1.1 million murders. After the war ended, he returned to everyday society, and by all accounts, lived a normal life.

Because Auschwitz had mostly been deconstructed, evidence was destroyed or non-existent, and it was nearly impossible to prove that Hanning was complicit in the heinous war crimes committed at the camp.

Photo by Bernd Thissen/AFP/Getty Images.

But then, German Public Prosecution Service ordered the creation of a VR version of Auschwitz. Ralf Breker, a forensic engineer with the Bavarian state crime office, led the VR work that made a case against Hanning possible.

Photo by Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images.

VR technology allows judges to step into the shoes of the accused and view what they likely saw during the time period in question.

Pretty neat, right? Here’s how the technology works.

Breker and other leading engineers captured the camp’s physical geometry with a painstakingly accurate laser scanner — the same device investigators often use to capture scans of modern-day crime scenes. The laser scans provide the foundation for a more complete version of the camp, which digitally reconstructs the crumbling buildings into their former wartime state.

Photo by Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images.

With a 3D representation of the Auschwitz camp, judges had evidence that falsified Hanning’s claims of being unaware of what was happening. Using an HTC Vive, the court was able to virtually step into Hanning’s shoes to examine what he likely saw back then, including views of the ramp where prisoners entered, and the rail yard where they were subjected to the choice of slave labor or death.

"The great significance of this trial of Reinhold Hanning, using a virtual reality model in the courtroom, is that virtual reality proves that he was an accomplice of murder," said former U.S. War Crimes Ambassador David Scheffer.

Thanks to VR technology, Hanning was convicted in a Detmold court in 2016 as an accessory to 170,000 murders.

While Hanning continued to deny the charges, he apologized for his complicity, saying, "I am ashamed that I saw injustice and never did anything about it, and I apologize for my actions."

Unfortunately, Hanning never faced justice for his crimes. He died before he was able to serve his five-year prison sentence. Thus confirming that the commonly described "hunt" for Nazi guards and officials is an infuriating race-against-time conundrum. Hanning died at the age of 95, which means he's likely one of the last living Nazi officials who could actually be brought to trial.

While nothing will replace the millions of people lost in the Holocaust, nor make up for the trauma survivors experienced, this technological advancement is a sign that the road to justice is long, and often extremely difficult, but worth it. Rommel believes that even if it's only able to bring a few to justice for now, it's imperative to do the work to set the stage for other similar justice endeavors.

“It’s our responsibility to try what’s possible today, and that’s why my colleagues and I do our job, even if we only find a few that are still living and may be convicted.”

If justice is what's to come, we're thrilled to see how VR can get us there.

Check out "Nazi VR" below.

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