The History of the Auschwitz Camps, Told by Authentic Wartime Documents

It is well-known that the most-important historical-documental source on the Auschwitz Camp published so far is the 1989 German tome Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Bir­kenau 1939-1945 by Danuta Czech, which was published a year later also in English with the title Auschwitz Chronicle 1939-1945. However, this massive work only offers a prejudiced, biased view of the camp’s history, because it has a limited and tendentious focus on the alleged extermination of the Jews and Gypsies, which are portrayed as having been the main, if not even the sole purpose of the activities unfolding at Auschwitz. The book gives the impression that the camp SS, starting with the camp’s Commandant Rudolf Höss, had nothing else to think of and to do day in, day out than to exterminate human beings. This perspective is both incomplete and profoundly wrong.

First, as I have documented thoroughly in a separate study, the “events” described by Danuta Czech are a collection of assumptions, distortions, inventions and omissions, which allow her to paint a fairy-tale image resulting from a deliberately misleading and pathologically mendacious method.[1]

Add to this that the opening of historical archives in Moscow made accessible a deluge of documents – especially those of the Central Construction Office of Auschwitz – which on the one hand have opened up immense and unexpected historical horizons, and on the other hand have rendered Czech’s Chronicle obsolete.

The work presented here is meant to offer as complete as possible a historical-documental image of the Auschwitz Camp’s activities, in which also the oft-claimed “criminal traces” are put into their proper, harmless historical context.

The only merit of Czech’s Chronicle is the list of deportation transports arriving at Auschwitz (but not their fate!). However, Czech’s approach was purely chronological, because she lists the registration numbers assigned to admitted inmates in her entry for the day on which those numbers were assigned. If one wants to find out when a certain registration number was issued, however, it is necessary to leaf through many pages of the Chronicle, with its many entries dealing with a broad variety of events, in search for a specific transport. This can be very time-consuming, since the numbers were not always assigned chronologically. For instance, the numbers 20951-20986 were issued on 18 September 1941, while the subsequent numbers 20987-20992 were assigned only on 11 February 1942.

Since compilations of total figures are more important to most readers than the exact date when a certain registration number was assigned, the statistically interesting aspect of the Auschwitz inmates – transports and registrations, camp occupancy as well as mortality – were not integrated into the chronological part of the present study, but set out in tables in its second part. The list of registered inmates contained in it include all known number series of all inmate categories (male and female) in a continuous sequence.

In the first, chronological part of this study, only the camp occupancy numbers of such inmates were included that were considered unfit for labor and deployment, especially “inpatients”, “invalids” and “adolescents”. If we were to follow the orthodox Holocaust narrative, these inmates would have been the primary targets for homicidal gassings, yet in the camp’s documents recalcitrantly ignored by Czech, these inmates are listed consistently and steadily as very much alive.

One statistical aspect of the camp’s history neglected by Czech concerns the camp’s occupancy, meaning the number of inmates present in the camp at any given time. Czech’s Chronicle only provides sketchy and very incomplete data about this, which are scattered throughout her book. However, the documentation preserved on this aspect, which is include in Part 2 of the present study, is much more comprehensive than what Czech has quoted in this regard.

The same is true for the documentation on the registered inmates’ mortality, a topic only superficially treated by Czech, who gives a few total figures here and there. This aspect is covered in Part 2 in great detail. The introduction to this Part 2 contains more detailed explanation on the methods and formats used to lay out this massive body of statistical data.[2]

The text of the documents listed in the present part (some 2,400) has been taken in most cases from photocopies or electronic scans of the originals; the archival reference for each document is given next to it in the outside margin. In a few cases, the source is a book (containing photo reproduction or transcripts of documents), for which a brief reference pointing to this book’s bibliography is given. For completeness’s sake, all known garrison and headquarters orders issued by the Auschwitz camp administration were also integrated. The source for these orders is usually a source edition published by the German Institute for Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) in Munich (see Frei).

Undated documents where we do not know the month and year when they were created were not included; the most probable date of other documents where we know at least the year, and in some cases also the month, have been included, but the date is set in brackets.

In case of very important documents, their entire text has been quoted. In other cases, essential parts were quoted, while the rest has often been summarized.

The topics of the documents listed are diverse, but the main focus is on the documentation of the sanitary and medical situation as well as the planning and construction of the camp, and here especially of the crematories at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only rarely included are documents on the many satellite camps in the grater Auschwitz region.

This work does not claim to be complete, but it offers an enormous quantity of information – mainly from archives in Moscow (RGVA, GARF), Auschwitz (APMO) and Warsaw (AGK), but also of radio messages intercepted by the British. This is therefore an essential basis for further possible documental contributions in the future.

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Print and eBook versions of the complete book are available from Armreg at armreg.​co.uk.

Endnotes