The Historiography of the Holocaust

The Topography of Genocide 227
For most death camps, like POW camps, this monumentalization never
occurred because these were regarded as temporary structures. Once their function
was no longer needed when the war was won or all the Jews and Romanies
in their deadly catchment were killed, the camps were disposed of. Many had
barracks that were made from prefabricated, disposable kits, which again is why
POW and Displaced Persons camps, both British and German, internment camps
for Japanese in the US, and death camps in Poland look similar. The main camp
at Auschwitz being a concentration camp on German soil, and hence having a
planned role in the future as a place of punishment and re-education, should
have had one of the monumental gatehouses, but a shortage of building materials
meant this was never realized. 31 Birkenau’s brick gatehouse with a two-storey
watchtower is therefore unique among the six death camps and its appearance
has more to do with the size of the camp that had to be surveyed (figure 8). Even
today the sight-lines from the tower across the camp are excellent.
Auschwitz-Birkenau’s infamous watchtower is very much an extension of
Bentham’s Panopticon. Like the gatehouses of the concentration camps in
Germany, it reminds one of the forbidding entrances to the utilitarian workhouses
found in England in the nineteenth century and still operating into the
twentieth. 32 David Lean’s representation of the workhouse and its inmates in
the opening scenes of his film Oliver Twist owes as much to the description of
the camps as to nineteenth-century workhouses. Others have seen modernist
continuities in a specific German context through ‘Hitler’s engineers...taking
over the practices of Bauhaus design’. 33
We are all familiar with the searchlight sweeping across a camp landscape in
a POW film such as The Colditz Story. Searchlights and lighting within those
camps and concentration and death camps were also to aid the surveillance of
the captives. Yet lighting had another important functional purpose: it meant
that the death camps could work through the night. For all commercial and
industrial activity the advent of electricity had meant that night was no longer
a period of inactivity. 34 So it was for the factories of death.
Moreover, they announced the presence of the camp to those beyond its
borders. In those suburban/rural locations the power of the occupying forces
could be read in the bright glow of electricity. It was a symbol of modernity,
demonstrating that the Germans were bringing light to the dark corners of
Europe. Such a metaphor in the landscape was there for a regime that had
decreed that its greatest deeds could never be written down.
Trains and cars and planes
What modernity taught us – that ‘communication, exchange and motion
bring to humanity enlightenment and progress’ – was mocked in the Shoah by