Steve Matthews's Blog - Posts Tagged "wwii"
Hitler's Brothel and the holocaust
My interest in the Holocaust goes back many years to when a Polish work colleague took extended leave to visit Poland and see his family. When he returned I asked him how it went: could his relatives speak English, did he understand them? It was then that he told me he did not go to meet them – he went to see them: their photographs were on the wall in Block 6 at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Years later I was in Germany and found myself in Berlin – the wall had not been down long, and I wanted to see the Brandenburg Gate and Checkpoint Charlie. My business partner suggested we should also go to Poland and visit Krakow. We did, so we toured Auschwitz as well.
The day was grey, misty and bleak - a typically gloomy winter’s day. Nobody spoke in the small bus that took us to Auschwitz, and after we walked through those infamous gates, Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Liberates) we were ushered away to first see a film about the camp and its liberation. In shock, we then looked at the exhibits. It is hard to see hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes behind glass, huge piles of human hair, false teeth and spectacles, uncountable numbers of artificial limbs, and perhaps the most offensive- children’s shoes and toys. 232,000 children were recorded as entering the camp...
The remains of the gas chambers and crematorium left us numb. I remember seeing a young woman on the steps, her head in her hands as she sobbed. The soldier’s barracks were made of brick, but the prisoner’s huts were constructed of wood, each side lined with bunks: three levels, 5 prisoners on each level, 400 prisoners to each hut. Only a few huts remain.
It is hard to re-visit my feelings about the way these poor people were treated and suffered. The conditions they lived in and worked under is incomprehensible to most of us today.
When I returned to Australia, I was talking to a friend about Auschwitz and he asked me if I had seen Barrack 24. He told me there had been a brothel there, and to be honest, I thought he was mistaken. I could not recall it being mentioned during the tour, so I did some research and discovered that there was indeed a brothel at Auschwitz. It was at this point that Hitler’s Brothel was born.
Years later I was in Germany and found myself in Berlin – the wall had not been down long, and I wanted to see the Brandenburg Gate and Checkpoint Charlie. My business partner suggested we should also go to Poland and visit Krakow. We did, so we toured Auschwitz as well.
The day was grey, misty and bleak - a typically gloomy winter’s day. Nobody spoke in the small bus that took us to Auschwitz, and after we walked through those infamous gates, Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Liberates) we were ushered away to first see a film about the camp and its liberation. In shock, we then looked at the exhibits. It is hard to see hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes behind glass, huge piles of human hair, false teeth and spectacles, uncountable numbers of artificial limbs, and perhaps the most offensive- children’s shoes and toys. 232,000 children were recorded as entering the camp...
The remains of the gas chambers and crematorium left us numb. I remember seeing a young woman on the steps, her head in her hands as she sobbed. The soldier’s barracks were made of brick, but the prisoner’s huts were constructed of wood, each side lined with bunks: three levels, 5 prisoners on each level, 400 prisoners to each hut. Only a few huts remain.
It is hard to re-visit my feelings about the way these poor people were treated and suffered. The conditions they lived in and worked under is incomprehensible to most of us today.
When I returned to Australia, I was talking to a friend about Auschwitz and he asked me if I had seen Barrack 24. He told me there had been a brothel there, and to be honest, I thought he was mistaken. I could not recall it being mentioned during the tour, so I did some research and discovered that there was indeed a brothel at Auschwitz. It was at this point that Hitler’s Brothel was born.
