There could hardly be a better way to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz than by publishing what is probably the only first-hand account of its horrors written in the death camp itself, writes Robert Low
February 18, 2020 16:10
Last Stop Auschwitz by Eddy de Wind (Doubleday, £14.99) and The Berlin Mission by Richard Breitman (Public Affairs, £22.99)
There could hardly be a better way to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz than by publishing what is probably the only first-hand account of its horrors written in the death camp itself. It is a sad commentary on the British publishing industry that it has taken 75 years for it to appear in English.
Its author, Eddy de Wind, was a young Dutch doctor who was sent to Auschwitz in 1943 from the Westerbork transition camp in the Netherlands, with his 18-year-old wife Friedel, a nurse whom he had met in Westerbork.
Somehow they both survived. Eddie’s youth and training were the key factors in enabling him to live. He mainly worked as a medical orderly, though he also had to endure punishing months as a labourer which few others came through alive.
Friedel’s survival derived from a more macabre reason: she was one of the inmates in Block Ten, reserved for prisoners who were subjected to Auschwitz’s notorious medical experiments.
A particularly touching theme throughout de Wind’s description of the appalling events he witnessed daily are his attempts to meet Friedel, risking his life every time he did so. Hearing of the dreadful experiments going on, he managed to speak to the Lagerarzt, the doctor in charge of the block, to ask him to spare Friedel’s life. Nowhere in the book is the doctor named: it was Josef Mengele.
De Wind wrote his account in the turbulent days following the Germans’ withdrawal from the camp: he did so in the third person, calling himself Hans, perhaps in an attempt to distance himself from the terrible things he had experienced.
It was published in 1946 in the Netherlands by a communist publishing firm that soon went bust; republished in a fuller edition in 1980; and is only now available to English-speaking readers.
De Wind returned to his speciality, psychiatry, and became a distinguished psychoanalyst specialising in war trauma.
There could have been no one better qualified — his dispassionate report from the heart of the Nazi extermination project should be required reading in an era when the last Holocaust survivors are leaving us and denial is once again in the air.
Could Auschwitz have been averted, and Hitler stopped in his tracks by tougher action by the Western powers before he consolidated his hold on power in the 1930s?
The question inevitably arises in reading The Berlin Mission, the story of Raymond Geist, a US consul in Berlin for a decade from 1929.
If you relied solely on Wikipedia you would conclude that Geist’s main achievement was to deny US visas for most of the hundreds of thousands of Jews seeking to escape from Germany and Austria in the pre-war years. Richard Breitman, an American academic and Holocaust authority, tells a very different story.
From the start, Geist made it his business to get to know the top Nazis as well as what ordinary people thought. His reports to Washington show an extraordinary insight into Hitler’s character and long-term ambitions well before most other people, certainly including his weak and ineffectual ambassador William Dodd. Alas, they largely fell on deaf ears.
At the same time, Geist was actively intervening on behalf of Jews, American and otherwise, arrested by the Nazis, and did everything he could to help Jews trying to obtain priceless US visas, including Einstein and Freud, but countless other more humble people, too. Breitman makes it clear that the chief obstacle to German Jews getting visas was American antisemitism, especially in Congress and the State Department.
Geist lived a charmed life in Berlin. He was a fairly open homosexual, living with his sister and his handsome young German lover throughout his Berlin years (and afterwards), a risky business anywhere in the 1930s, never mind Nazi Germany.
Perhaps this gave him an instinctive sympathy for oppressed minorities. He certainly deserves the belated recognition he receives in Breitman’s fascinating book.
Robert Low is executive editor of The Critic.
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