Auschwitz’s Brutal Lesson

February 1, 2025 by Diana L. Banister

The stench of decaying flesh still lingered in the barracks of Auschwitz the day I visited in 1987. The rooms with the hair and the teeth and the glasses of the victims of this despicable extermination camp caused me to run out and vomit next to a tree in the yard.

Eighty years since the liberation of that Nazi death camp and it is still incomprehensible that any human being could do this to another.

What struck me was the systematic nature of it all. Adolf Hitler built new train stations so the prisoners could be dropped off right outside the iron gates that falsely read “Arbeit Macht Frei.” No, work would not make anyone who came to this camp free, it would not help them escape the torture, the starvation, the pain. There were barracks for each nationality or undesirable type -- Poles, gypsies, the mentally impaired…

“What more could have been done” are the haunting words hanging on a banner above the entrance to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The museum displays the horrifying brutality suffered by more than six million Jews and four million others at the hands of Hitler and his barbaric thugs in those camps.

As the free world commemorated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday we can never forget what the brave Allied forces encountered as thy took back the land in France and Poland and Belgium and across Europe: tens of thousands of dead bodies, withering, emaciated human beings forced into Hitler’s death camps.

When American troops entered Buchenwald, the horrific scene of the more than 56,000 men, women, and children stacked in mounds and trenches, some shot, some gassed to death others dead from maltreatment, exposure, starvation, or illness.

According to the Soviet soldiers who liberated Majdanek in Poland, in April 1944 “the gas chambers were mainly reserved for Jewish victims, Poles and Soviet POWs were often executed in mass shootings or systematically worked or starved to death, if typhus epidemics did not claim them.”

Historian and author Doris Bergen described Hitler’s SS who ran Majdanek as “sadists who enjoyed killing children in front of their mothers and forcing the prisoners to engage in deadly ‘sports.’”

On November 3, 1943, Heinrich Himmler, head of SS, had ordered the extermination of Jews at Majdanek. Witnesses explain the “machine guns mowing them down in trenches, forcing people to kneel on corpses as they shot them while dance music blasted from loudspeakers played to drown out the screams.” By the end of the day 18,000 had been murdered.

As Americans of the 42nd Infantry Division came upon Dachau, they discovered a train overflowing with corpses, gaunt, shriveled, and twisted.

The 71st Infantry Division that liberated the Gunskirchen camp in Austria in May of 1945 found 15,000 Hungarian Jews left in the camp. The Americans tried to give the skeletal prisoners rations but because of prolonged malnourishment the majority still died.

The Soviets liberated Auschwitz in Poland where the most systematic assembly line killing center for exterminating Jews existed to carry out Hitler’s “final solution.” More than a million Jews and undesirables were murdered in Auschwitz’ gas chambers and firing lines.

The inexplicable inhumanity, the cruel and abhorrent treatment of other human beings. No doubt the Nazis did not see Jews as human beings.

More disturbing is: how could it happen? How could sensible men and women turn a blind eye to what was going on while millions of their fellow citizens were being massacred by Hitler and his henchmen?

When the Allies who recorded details from the camps and prepared the report for the Nuremberg trial interviewed local residents to ask them about what they had seen, their answer was frequently: “What could we do?”

Too many stood by and allowed it to happen. Eric Metaxas, in his book on Lutheran Minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, points out that even a majority of churches in Germany did nothing to stop this systematic murder of millions of Jews.

The radical Jew hatred on college campuses, at elite institutions and in our streets over the last year shows some have learned nothing from the past. We have seen the same despicable hatred toward a race of people that led to the systematic murder of 10 million people and a world war.

No doubt our elite colleges and universities have become cesspools of hate and tyranny, cloaked in free speech but the cruel display of antisemitism and discrimination by race has now seeped into parts of our society.

For this reason alone, President Donald Trump’s pursuit to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and departments from government departments is a critically important start. Perhaps we can turn back this obsession with separating people based on our differences that has been the focus for the last decades.

Trump’s inauguration on the same day we honor Dr. Martin Luther King is significant. We can never go back to judging or discriminating against someone based on the color of their skin.

Never again.