SOCIETY
“They’re Not People!”
The denial of personhood as a prerequisite for atrocities
It’s instantly recognisable. The entrance to Auschwitz, Poland, where over a million human beings were murdered by the Nazis between 1940-1945.
The Auschwitz concentration camp was actually a complex of sites. Auschwitz-Birkenau — the killing centre — was located two miles from the main site and there were numerous subcamps.
The Holocaust
The word ‘Auschwitz’ today has become synonymous with the Holocaust — slaughter on a massive scale. Eighty years after it was liberated and shut down, the word still evokes a sense of horror.
The death toll included tens of thousands of Poles, Roma (Gypsies), and Soviet prisoners of war, but by far the majority of those murdered here were Jews.
The killing was indiscriminate. Men, women and children were all ‘processed’ and destroyed mercilessly. Auschwitz-Birkenau even had its own ‘family camps’.
Of course, Auschwitz wasn’t the only death camp. In total, around 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945.
In the decades since then, countless people have wondered how such an atrocity could have happened. How could so many ordinary…
