90 years after Hitler’s democratic victory, three books that recount the atrocities of Nazism

This March 5 marks the 90th anniversary of the victory of adolf hitler in the parliamentary elections in Germany in 1933 which will complete the consolidation of the power of the nazi party. Although the German politician, soldier and dictator had already taken office in January of the same year as Chancellor at the hands of the President Paul von Hindenburgthe National Socialist German Workers’ Party continues to represent a minority in the government, where it holds only three of the eleven ministries.

As the Nazis still needed his state legitimacyHitler decided to bring forward the elections, which would be the last in which the list proportional representation system was used, as well as the last to be held in a united Germany until 1990. Although they allowed the participation of opposition forces (also for the last time), the nazi party he misused state resources to fund his campaign, used direct intimidation, and took advantage of fears of a Communist-induced civil war.

“Now it will be easy to fight, because we can use all the resources of the state. The press and the radio are at our disposal”, he wrote in his diary, a few days before the elections, Joseph Goebbelsone of the closest collaborators of Hitler who will eventually occupy the post of Minister of Propaganda. so close to 20 million Germans show their support for the Nazi Partywhich he won with 44% of the votes.

Today, the result is known to all. But it has not always been so. As the Italian explains Primo Levi in its monumental if it’s a manone of the biggest concerns of concentration camp prisoners was that they believed that, in the unlikely event that they survived, no one would believe the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Many, however, lived to tell about it, and they did so through books that are currently essential to understanding one of the darkest periods in European history.

Below, we share three books whose testimonies bring back to the present a past that, however distant it may seem, must never be forgotten.

Yes of holocaust it’s about, it can’t miss if it’s a manthe first volume of Auschwitz Trilogy from Italian Primo Levi. Published in 1947, just two years after the author’s release from the largest Nazi death camp, this book inaugurated what would later become known as concentration camp literature.

As explained Levi In this book of dramatic testimonies, what kept the concentration camps safe and “hidden” for so long was not so much the barbed wire fences and guards, but their own monstrosity, which made them inconceivable. Thus, the need to tell these atrocities and show them to the world has become urgent.

To this poignant story – which includes not only the sufferings endured by the prisoners of the camp but also the dynamics that occurred within them, the micro-economies that were formed, the different “jobs” to which they were forced and even the liberation thanks to the Russian army – was followed, decades later, by two other volumes which complete the trilogy, Truce there Swallowed them up and saved them.

Levi says:

Häftling: I discovered that I am a Häftling. My name is 174517; we have been baptized, we will wear this flail tattooed on our left arm as long as we live.

The operation was a little painful and extraordinarily quick: they lined us all up and, one by one, following the alphabetical order of our names, we passed in front of a skilful official armed with a kind of needle punch very short. . This seems to have been the true and true initiation: only “if you show the number” do they give you bread and soup. It took us several days and not a few slaps and punches to get used to teaching the number diligently, so as not to interfere with daily supply operations; it took us weeks and months to learn to understand it in German. And for several days, while the habit of my days of freedom made me look at the time on my wristwatch, ironically I saw my new name, the number dotted in bluish signs under the epidermis.

For decades, when it came to telling what happened inside the extermination centers during Nazism, there was a great absence in the lists of its victims: homosexuals. The men of the pink triangleViennese Hey Hegeris the book which, nearly half a century after the end of the Second World WarHe came to fill that void.

The story the author tells, from a perspective that has never been told before, is devastating. He was first arrested in 1937 after his relationship with the son of a high-ranking Nazi military officer was discovered. They released him after ten months of torture, only to be arrested again. This time the Nazi authorities forced him to choose between castration or imprisonment in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Heger opted for castration.

But his nightmare was far from over. In 1943, the author was arrested a third time and then transferred to the Neuengamme camp where he was detained until the end of the war. This book recounts the atrocities and hardships experienced there, not only by him but by all kinds of victims.

highlights of The men of the pink triangle is that it highlights the particular treatment that homosexuals and people LGBT+ they had in the death camps, branded with a fearsome piece of pink cloth which, according to Heger, earned them even worse mistreatment than the rest of the victims. However, thanks to the author’s unusual resilience, added to a love affair with a nazi soldier within the field, they allowed it to survive until the end of the 20th century to be able to tell a part of the story that had remained stagnant between silence and oblivion.

Said if:

During the torture, the goons drank alcohol from bottles that were passed around. They were already completely intoxicated when a new torment came to them, something that could only come from the brain of an evil pervert.

“He’s an asshole, isn’t he?” Well, let’s give him what he wants,” mumbled one of the soldiers.

He took a broom that was in a corner and stuck a good part of the handle in the anus of the unfortunate. He couldn’t scream anymore, his vocal cords no longer responding from the pain, but his body tensed violently once more, struggling with its bonds; the poor boy had to hide a great vital force. The SS were laughing out loud, while the lips of the “dirty fagot” parted as if to utter a cry without a single sound coming out of them.

In 2017, Lucy AdlingtonBritish historian and novelist with over twenty years experience in historical research, has published her book the red ribbona novel set in Auschwitz sewing workshops. Adlington had stumbled upon reading a brief article about this little-known part of the Nazi concentration camp complex on Polish soil, but the lack of information led him to take an interest in fiction: he imagined a story, and with her, he wrote a book for teenagers that would become a Bestseller world.

What the author did not expect was that following his novel, messages would begin to reach him from all over the world: “My mother was a seamstress in Auschwitz”, “my grandmother was there “, “my aunt went through all that”. At that moment, his novel came true.

This is how the idea of Seamstresses of Auschwitza book which, like the red ribbon, revolves around the existence of a haute couture workshop inside Nazism’s deadliest concentration camp, but without fictionalizing or fictionalizing anything. This time, thanks to the testimony of one of the seamstresses, it was not necessary.

In 2019 Adlington traveled from England to San Francisco, USA to interview Bracha Berkovicwho was then the last living seamstress of the two dozen who were forced to work at Auschwitz for nearly five years. Berkovic told the author about the thousand days he spent in Auschwitz, his sewing workshop and the women with whom, between stitches, hemming and mending, he planned his escape. “I was in Auschwitz for a thousand days. Every day I could have died a thousand times”, says Berkovic.

Adlington Dice:

The Auschwitz garment workshop was established by none other than Hedwig Höss, wife of the camp commander-in-chief. And as if this combination of fashion salon and place of extermination wasn’t already grotesque enough, the identities of the women who worked there already broke the camel’s back: most of the seamstresses in the workshop were Jewish women dispossessed of everything and deported. by the Nazis, and whose ultimate destination was annihilation as part of the Final Solution. They were joined by non-Jewish communists from occupied France whom they had imprisoned and intended to eliminate for their resistance to the Nazis.

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