Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution

by Laurence Rees

320pp, BBC, £20

Auschwitz: A History

by Sybille Steinbacher, translated by Shaun Whiteside

168pp, Penguin, £6.99

In the summer of 1947, by Polish government decree, Auschwitz was turned into a national museum. Wreath-laying ceremonies transformed the camp into a visitors' shrine. There was even the macabre indecency - in this place - of a cafeteria. Today notices admonish the tourist: "You are entering a place of exceptional horror and tragedy." More than 90% of those who lost their lives at Auschwitz - whether by toxic gas, starvation or forced labour - were Jews. (The current estimate is over 1m.) Auschwitz remains the largest graveyard in human history.

Auschwitz was not a single camp; 39 satellite camps formed a malignant universe. The main camp at Auschwitz I was the administrative centre; Auschwitz II was the extermination centre; Auschwitz III was a hybrid death-and-work camp. Numerous German companies exploited the presence of Jews at Auschwitz. Among them were Bayer, Agfa, BASF and Pelikan (which provided the ink to tattoo prisoners). So the camp operated as an industrial, as well as an extermination centre, whose factories used unpaid slave labour. Incredibly, the synthetic-rubber factory which Jewish prisoners built at Auschwitz III is still in operation. A railway carrying 7,000 Polish workers to the factory runs directly from Oswiecim (Auschwitz) civilian station, just as it had during the war. Travelling to the factory with these workers today is an experience that leaves the visitor feeling disturbed and contaminated.

Never before had a European nation planned the annihilation of an entire people. When Hitler said "exterminate all Jews", he meant all deported, all exterminated, even newborns (for they, too, were potential enemies of the Third Reich). The 20th century was fraught with atrocity. The atomic holocaust of Hiroshima and Stalin's technocratic Russia showed man's wilful and destructive misuse of science and indus try. Yet there is a unique moral horror to what the Nazis did in occupied Poland. The industrial exploitation of Jewish slaves and Jewish corpses - their ashes and their teeth - was a uniquely Hitlerian atrocity. At Auschwitz the murder of Jews was made a civic virtue; and in this way, Germany departed from the community of civilised human beings.

Most historians agree that Auschwitz was the outcome of the most murderous legislative document known to European history: the 1935 Nuremberg laws. Overnight, the laws turned German Jews into biological heretics and "vermin" to be removed from the Aryan state. Hitler's war against the Jews should never be forgotten. Yet half of Britain's teenagers have reportedly never heard of Auschwitz or do not understand its significance (Harry Windsor and his swastika may be proof of this). These two excellent histories of Auschwitz are published to coincide with the anniversary of the camp's liberation by the Red Army 60 years ago this week. They provide a valuable record of Nazi atrocity as well as a key to understanding man's inhumanity to man.

Laurence Rees's book accompanies the current BBC2 series on the Nazis and the final solution. By his patient accumulation of evidence, Rees seeks to refute Himmler's cynical pledge that the destruction of Jews was to be an "unwritten page of glory". Rees disproves the common notion that Auschwitz staff were uniformly sadists. Most of the 6,000 Reich Germans stationed at the camp were unremarkable Schreibtischtäter - "desk murderers" - who eliminated the innocent at the stroke of a pen. Apprenticeship in Nazi obedience required a stunted moral imagination; lack of imagination (willed or otherwise) - not sadism - was what made the Auschwitz SS cruel.

As Rees makes clear, Stalinist Russia had no equivalent of the wretchedly servile Auschwitz functionary Rudolf Höss. In his self-justifying memoir, Kommandant in Auschwitz , Höss recounts with disturbing indifference the immense pride he took in the smooth running of the Auschwitz gas chambers. The Nazi practice of extermination - Vernichtungswissenschaft - had in fact become so refined under Höss that the condemned remained deceived until the door shut on them in the false shower rooms. Zyklon B crystals (a pesticide used to kill rats) suffocated them.

Once people have been deprived of their humanity it is much easier to kill them. (All modern dictatorships have known this.) The Jews who were shunted to Auschwitz in cattle trucks were so degraded by their journey that they were no longer considered Menschen - human beings - but animals to slaughter. Typically, Auschwitz personnel ensured that their awareness of this horror was confined to their own special competence (the punctual departure of trains, the registration of arrivals). It was this willed ignorance that enabled them to ignore the moral consequences of their work.

Sybille Steinbacher's brief but powerful study, Auschwitz: A History , chronicles the depredations of the camp in the dispassionate tones of a courtroom testimonial. A German historian, Steinbacher reflects that ours is an age of diminished responsibility. The division of labour at the camp - the "fragmentation of responsibility" - made the contribution of any single person seem unimportant. The SS doctors felt no more responsible, personally, for killing Gypsies with phenol injections (to the heart) than the Jewish Special Squads who were forced by the SS to shepherd fellow Jews to the gas chambers.

Interviews with Special Squad survivors shed disturbing light on the corruption and moral ambiguity in Auschwitz. In most cases squad conscripts were ordinary Jews degraded into collaboration: they worked for the Nazis in order to survive. ("You become indifferent," one of them tells Rees. "A human being can get used to anything.") At the terrible heart of these books is a warning to those who deliver facile judgments of condemnation: only those who survived Auschwitz have the right to forgive or condemn. And even they are not properly fit to do so, for those who fathomed the depths of human degradation did not come back to tell the tale. (The same point is made by Primo Levi in his writings on the Nazi camps.)

Steinbacher devotes an angry chapter to demolishing pseudo-scholars who deny the mass murders at Auschwitz. In 1979, infamously, the Lyons University professor Robert Faurisson claimed that the Nazi gassings were a pack of "Jewish lies". Other falsifiers of history have been no less shoddy. In a recent trial the British historian David Irving was proved to have wilfully misinterpreted the evidence for the exterminations and was judged an anti-semite. (Irving had gone so far as to dismiss Levi's great Auschwitz memorial, If This Is a Man, as a "novel" by a "mentally unstable" Jew.) Others still have tried to argue for a supposed moral equivalence between Hitler's extermination of the Jews and the earlier Stalinist extermination of the kulaks. According to this revisionist polemic, the final solution merely imitated Stalin's slaughter: there would have been no Auschwitz without the gulag.

Rees and Steinbacher refute these sly propositions. At Auschwitz the Nazis had embarked on something that had never been attempted before - the assembly-line gassing of human beings. And this remains an isolated instance of human infamy. Sixty years on, we are still trying to understand the catastrophe that engulfed the Jews in the Hitlerite storm. If there is a lesson to be learnt from these books, perhaps it is this: Auschwitz has happened once and Auschwitz can happen again.

· Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi is published by Vintage.