* * * * *
Lessons from the Holocaust for the present day.
This book is the author’s first-hand account of what she experienced between 1942 and 1945, mainly in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, bolstered by what she was told by others who were also there and whose accounts she was careful to check as far as possible. Auschwitz was a large forced labour camp including several different industrial enterprises which paid the SS for slave labour intentionally worked to death there. Birkenau was a reception and extermination camp within Auschwitz, where those who might be able to work were separated from those who might not be able to work. The former were set to work, for as long as they lasted in dreadful conditions, the latter were killed more or less immediately unless they had other uses. Few detainees were retained to work in Birkenau itself and even fewer survived. A significant proportion of these had medical training, and partly because of this not only were they forced to assist in medical experiments on humans; they understood what they were seeing. The author was more or less the only one who both understood what she was seeing and lived to tell the tale. Forgive me if there were others, but this really is the best all-round account we have.
This isn’t a review of a book I was asked to read and review or one I just happened to review: it is a review of a book I remembered from years ago and bought and read a fresh copy of, because there are things happening in the world today which cannot be fully discussed for many reasons, the most valid of which is that some crimes and tragedies are so unbelievable that they are innocently and helplessly denied by eye-witnesses and even direct victims at the scene and caught up in the process. The less valid reason is that the authors of great tragedies inevitably and energetically contest the facts until the last guilty verdict is delivered a decade or two after the event.
George Santayana wrote that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” but how might we learn the lessons of a recent past that is hidden from us? We cannot remember what we are not allowed to know! Well, Santayana’s quote supplies the tools we need: the sort of person or coalition of vested interests that might obfuscate truth and reality on a global scale might very well fail to remember the past and, therefore, the past will contain a template for the very actions they are condemned to repeat, the study of which will allow the rest of us to understand not only what has just been going and what is going on now, but what the next moves might be!
Because this is a non-fiction account of historical events with no surprise twists at the end, I will be breaking my usual rule by using three quotes from the text. The first quote is actually from a letter sent to the author after pre-publication copies were circulated and it is in the front matter of the Kindle version reviewed here; you have to click or tap LEFT from the “beginning” to see it:
“you have done a real service by letting the ones who are now silent and most forgotten speak…”
A. Einstein.
This is not a celebrity endorsement but an authoritative one. It is time for a substantial number of old and new readers to both read and discuss this book, if the evil described in it is not to re-occur either because we do not recall or because we do not understand. All knowledge, even seemingly unshakeable “scientific or historical fact” decays into myth and superstition without the regular refreshment of discussion and debate. And “never again!” becomes a self-denying mantra if no-one is allowed to compare the Holocaust to other situations: past, present or future. Because even though these things are not exactly the same as the Holocaust (no two things are ever exactly the same) some of them may very well be heading in the same general direction at a greater or lesser pace. If we redefine “never again” as being “we’ll let anything pass just so long as we can see a shred of difference between it and the Holocaust” then we really are on the fast track to Hell.
The second quote is:
“The dissemination of ‘false news’ was forbidden by the Germans on pain of death.”
The politics of the Third Reich is linked to the present not by swastikas, parades through avenues of upturned searchlights, MP38/40 machine-pistols or even gas chambers, but by the global trend towards the rigid and increasingly ruthless imposition of a single narrative for everything, imposed by those with no visible chain of accountability. Not only are people having their lives and careers wrecked by even minor departures from the official narrative, that narrative appears much more complicated and far-reaching than that of Dr Goebbels and is therefore easier to transgress against. And it is the single allowable narrative that makes “NAZI Science” a dangerous idol for those who have learned not to deny the Holocaust itself. The striking thing about most of the human experiments described in Chapter XXII is not that they were cruel and murderous, never mind “unethical” but that they were completely and utterly unscientific, designed either to prove a premise that it was illegal to contradict, or simply devised by the camp’s own medical officers for their own amusement.
The remaining experiments were mainly only semi-scientific and most amounted to product development tests by German chemical and pharmaceutical companies of which Bayer was (and still is) the most significant. “Big Pharma” starts with Bayer, not with Beecham’s Pills. A vaccine institute sent numerous vaccines to be tested on Holocaust victims, but it isn’t clear that any useful information was recorded, because the test subjects were mostly sent to the gas chambers before the vaccines had time to work. If in the present day or the future, mass experiments are conducted, without informed consent on either a national or a global scale, with their execution and interpretation subject to a single authorised narrative which may not be challenged on pain of whatever punishment, they will be as unscientific and useless as those conducted in Auschwitz-Birkenau and recorded in “Five Chimneys.” The results of the tests there weren’t always even recorded because the narrative would not change, no matter what those results were. This kind of experiment is only really intended to give diktat a scientific veneer.
The third and final quote concerns a question which troubled not only the author but many of her medical colleagues forced to help conduct tests and experiments within the camp. There was a separate site for sterilisation experiments and these differed from the usual pattern in that the authorities actually seemed to have an interest in the results. Given that all camp inmates (and not just experimental subjects) were supposed to die in the camp anyway, what was the interest in sterilisation? They asked an Aryan German social worker who knew a lot of important people in Berlin (which may in itself explain why he ended up in Birkenau!) what it was all about:
“If they could sterilise all non-German people still alive after their victorious war, there would be no danger of new generations of ‘inferior’ peoples. At the same time, the living populations would be able to serve as labourers for about thirty years. After that time, the surplus German population would need all the living space in those countries, and the ‘inferiors’ would perish without descendants.”
The implication of that is that the primary victim groups of the Holocaust were just that: only the first on a list which ultimately included the vast majority of the human population of Planet Earth.
That’s an
objective not recorded in “Mein Kampf” but it was inscribed on
the Georgia Guidestones before someone fairly recently blew them up
with mining explosives. (Since the Guidestones were erected without the knowledge or consent of local authorities and residents, it's not clear if this demolition broke any laws. Whoever did it may have been legally as well as technically expert.)
Footnote, not published on Amazon out of respect for their community guidelines.
Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel has been published in several imprints since 1959; they all seem to be basically the same edition and this is a link to one of the imprints on Amazon that is currently available as either a Kindle E-book or a paperback:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06XGLG1DR
This is the source which this review is based on, but for copyright reasons readers in some Amazon domains might have to search for a different imprint of the same title and by the same author. In some countries it might be easier to access from second hand bookshops, either online or in a quiet back street.
(There used to be a pub on the Herts/Beds border called “The Five Chimneys” and anything with this title but not by Olga Lengyel may prove to be a beery history of a rural hostelry overlooking the Arlesey Brickworks!)
I actually read this book as a paperback more than a quarter of a century ago, but when I found myself wishing for a book saying things about recent and ongoing happenings which are not yet allowed to be said, I remembered that one had already been written and published two generations ago and all I had to do was buy it on Kindle, check that it still said what I remembered it had said, leave a review on Amazon and encourage others to not only read it for themselves and reach their own conclusions, but leave a review of their own on Amazon or anywhere else that’ll accept it.
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