Free Auschwitz by Laurence Rees Page A

entered the camp were returned to him. “They didn’t give me back my golden cross,” he says. “They kept that as a souvenir.” Then, almost in a parody of a normal prison release, the SS men asked if he had any complaints about his stay.
    I was cunning, and I said, “No.” They asked: “Are you satisfied with your stay in the camp?” I said, “Yes.” And I had to sign a form that I had no complaints and I will not go against the law. I didn’t know what law they had in mind because as a Pole I was not interested in German law. Our law was represented by our government in exile in London. But, of course, that was not the conversation I had with these guys.
    Together with three other Poles who were released that day, Bartoszewski was escorted by a German guard to Auschwitz railway station and put on a train. As the train pulled away he felt keenly “those first minutes of freedom.” Ahead of him lay a lengthy journey home, back to his mother in Warsaw. On the train, “People shook their heads. Some women were wiping their eyes out of compassion—you could see they were moved. They just asked, ‘Where are you coming from?’ We said, ‘Auschwitz.’ There was no comment—just a look, just fear.” Late that night, Bartoszewski arrived at his mother’s flat in Warsaw. “She was amazed to see me. She threw herself on me and embraced me. From above her I saw this white strand of hair on her head, which was the first change I noticed. She didn’t look too well. No one looked very well at that time.”
    Altogether, several hundred prisoners were released in a similar manner from Auschwitz. No one knows for certain why these individuals were chosen.
In Bartoszewski’s case, however, it seems that public pressure might have played a part, because the Red Cross and other institutions had been campaigning for his release. That the Nazis were susceptible to international pressure over prisoners at this time is confirmed by the fate of a number of Polish academics arrested in November 1939.
    As part of the purge of the intelligentsia, professors at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow were snatched from their lecture rooms and imprisoned in a variety of concentration camps, including Dachau. Fourteen months later, the surviving academics were released, almost certainly as a result of pressure from the outside world, including representations from the Pope.
    Meanwhile, Auschwitz entered a new and crucial phase of its evolution as another German had a “vision” that would further affect the development of the camp. Dr. Otto Ambros of I.G. Farben, the giant industrial conglomerate, was looking for a suitable site for a synthetic rubber factory in the East. He was only searching for such a location at all because the war had taken a different course from the one anticipated by the Nazi leadership. Just as Himmler, in May 1940, had imagined it possible that the Jews could be transported to Africa because the war would soon be over, so did I.G. Farben imagine at that time that it was unnecessary to pursue the difficult and expensive process of producing synthetic rubber and fuel. Once the war was over—say, at the latest, autumn 1940—plenty of raw materials would be available from outside the Reich, not least from Germany’s own new colonies seized from its enemies.
    But at the time, November 1940, the war was demonstrably not over. Churchill had refused to make peace and the RAF had repulsed German air attacks during the Battle of Britain. Once again, German planners had to react to the unexpected. Indeed, it is a recurring theme of this history that the Nazi leadership constantly must contend with events they have not properly anticipated. They always are driven by a sense of enormous ambition and optimism—anything can be accomplished by “will” alone—and then they are pulled short either by their