The estimate of 4 million dead was, as noted in the introduction, inviolable for Polish and many Israeli scholars, and for decades it remained inscribed in a variety contexts at the Auschwitz site. At the same time, according to the Auschwitz historian Andrzej Strzelecki, the figure took on a symbolic value that hindered further attempts to assess accurately the number of dead.41 Although this was certainly the case, the number, while inaccurate and based on insufficient research, should not be regarded as a conscious attempt in 1945 to inflate the number of dead for the “polonization,” “dejudaization,” or “internationalization” of Auschwitz and its memory. There is simply not sufficient evidence from these early years to support the claim of conscious manipulation of the figures.
It is also worth noting in this context that just as the number of 4 million Auschwitz victims was for decades considered immutable, so too was the figure of 6 million Polish citizens (3 million “Poles” and 3 million “Polish Jews”) killed during World War II. The number was set already in January 1947 and has remained a constant in postwar Polish scholarship and discourse. While the number of Polish Jews killed is still believed to be around 3 million, recent research has reduced the number of ethnic Poles killed and also has accounted for losses among members of other minorities who were citizens of the interwar Polish Republic.42
Inflated figures such as these can, of course, invite a simplistic and undifferentiated representation of wartime history, whether at Auschwitz or in general. This was especially the case with regard to the figure of 4 million dead at Auschwitz; Polish literature on the subject insufficiently demonstrated or even tended to minimize the Jewish tragedy at the camp.43 Eager to portray themselves and their country as having suffered the most under German occupation and seeing in the horrific extent of crimes at Auschwitz a clear illustration of the German security threat in the early postwar years, Poles were not inclined to offer conservative estimates of the number of victims at Auschwitz. Nor were they inclined to designate Jews as a separate category of victim that had suffered differently than other victim groups. Instead, Jews were generally included simply as citizens of their countries of origin. Thus, just as the number of Polish citizens who died in the war was typically set at approximately 6 million, the fact that half were Jews was often neglected. Similarly, the number of Auschwitz dead was taken to be approximately 4 million, but the precise number of Jewish dead or the proportion of Jews among those dead often remained unspecified, leading to the erroneous assumption that the Nazis subjected Polish Jews, Polish Gentiles, and other prisoners to equal treatment.
The research of the Central Commission and its Auschwitz branch proceeded slowly. The results of its research were provisional and the numerical estimates of victims certainly inaccurate, but in 1946 the group published a more comprehensive preliminary account of its findings. Entitled German Crimes in Poland, the volume is significant for a number of reasons. First, it classified German camps in Poland into four groups: Umsiedlungslager (resettlement camps), Arbeitslager (labor camps), Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) and Konzentrationslager (concentration camps). According to the report, only four extermination camps existed in Poland: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, and the latter three were used exclusively for the extermination of Jews and Gypsies. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Stutthof, and Maidanek were classified as Konzentrationslager with extermination facilities attached.44 Moreover, the Auschwitz complex was a special case, for it consisted of forty sub-camps and three major camps. The Auschwitz complex thus served as concentration camp, forced labor camp, and extermination center combined. This cast doubt upon the prevailing belief that Auschwitz was the largest and most “efficient” extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Europe, and made it all the more difficult to categorize Auschwitz and to arrive at a fixed and accurate understanding of what kind of camp it was, who its victims were, and how the camp was to be remembered and memorialized. Moreover, the report’s classification of Auschwitz as a concentration camp with auxiliary extermination facilities may have strengthened the perception among many Poles that it was a camp primarily intended for Polish political prisoners and Soviet POWs. The commission’s report was brief, vague, and left many questions unanswered. But it was the first published exposition of the Auschwitz crime which, unlike memoirs and newspaper accounts, relied on legal testimony and documentary evidence. As such, the report lent the ongoing investigation of Nazi crimes a degree of verifiable authenticity and, most importantly, offered the public a glimpse into the nature and extent of the horror of the camp.
Like the research and reports of organizations like the Central Commission, trials of Nazi criminals in Poland and Germany were also an effective source of information about Auschwitz and helped to shape its meaning in the early postwar period. The British trial of Joseph Kramer, Höss’s adjutant and later commandant of Birkenau, was held in the north German town of Lüneburg, far from Poland. The Polish press nonetheless covered the trial, and it provided a certain amount of information about the life and death of prisoners in the camp.45 Likewise, the proceedings of the International High Tribunal at Nürnberg received extensive press coverage. The report of the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland may have been the most authoritative source of information on crimes at Auschwitz, but Nürnberg, a sensational event of international proportions, received far greater attention in the Polish press than did the Commission’s findings. Thus, shocking headlines such as “Auschwitz: A Fate Worse than Death,” witnesses’ descriptions of children burned alive, and the testimony of Rudolf Höss, in which he confessed to supervising the murder of 3 million deportees at Auschwitz,46 would remain fixed in Polish memory for decades.
Höss’s own trial, held in Warsaw in the spring of 1947, was one of the greatest media events in early postwar Poland, and probably more than any other event focused the public’s attention on Auschwitz. As the commandant responsible for the construction and early expansion of the Auschwitz complex, Höss was regarded as the personification of Nazi bestiality in occupied Poland. At Nürnberg, the former commandant had been exceptionally forthcoming and frank about his own role at Auschwitz and, for many Poles, took on the role of the prime executor of Hitlerite enslavement and extermination policy. It was only fitting, then, that he be extradited to Poland, tried, and executed in the country where he committed the worst of his crimes. Moreover, Poland saw itself as bearing a special responsibility to the rest of the world: the nation was the arbiter of judgment not only on Höss, but on the system he represented and had helped to create. As Tadeusz Cyprian, one of Höss’s prosecutors, wrote in March 1947: “[T]he court that strips bare the motives of their [the Nazis’] actions with the merciless and cold approach of a surgeon, which penetrates the entire structure of the system in which they were raised or they themselves created—such a court fulfills the postulate of historical justice, for the court itself writes the history of the crime.”47 Indeed, the Höss trial was both a chronicle and interpretation of Auschwitz crimes, and the proceedings assumed spectacular proportions. Throughout March of 1947, full-page newspaper reports of the trial proceedings were the order of the day, reports that bombarded the reader with sensational headlines such as “Rudolf Höss—Murderer of 4 Million—Stands before the Polish Court,” “Testimonial Proof of the Crimes of Rudolf Höss—Freezing to Death of POWs,” “Fields Fertilized With Human Ash—Entire Transports Perished in the Crematoria in Five Hours,” or “2,850,000 Gassed in Auschwitz.”48
The Höss trial, extensive media coverage, and reports of the government’s forensic commission were the primary means of conveying the Auschwitz story to the Polish public in the first years after the liberation. They informed, interpreted, and directed Poland’s attention to Auschwitz as the salient example of German wartime brutality. There remained, however, room for further definition of the significance of Auschwitz in postwar Poland. Nationalist traditions, the pull of political expediency, and the development of a Polish “martyrological consciousness” would place Auschwitz at the center of the country’s commemoration of the occupation.
Toward a Martyrological Idiom
Władysław T. Bartoszewski has succinctly described why Poles and Jews have often been at odds over the meaning of Auschwitz. For Jews, the camp has become synonymous