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2 Scope of Nationalities
Auschwitz was also the destination to a greater national range of Jews than any other. From at least twelve
European countries Jews were deported to Auschwitz, and as such the history of Auschwitz testifies to the
pan-European character of the Holocaust. In addition, Auschwitz was a place where the Germans killed
tens of thousands of non-Jewish Poles, Sinti and Romani, and Soviet prisoners of war. These people died
with Jews and died the death of the Jews, and as such gave Auschwitz a particularly universal character.
3 Modernity
Auschwitz was in its technology and organization thoroughly “modern.” Many have interpreted Auschwitz
as the juncture where the European industrial system went awry. As the nexus of technological prowess,
bureaucratic discipline and ideological determination, Auschwitz was not only thoroughly modern, but
also “civilized.” The architects who designed the camp were university graduates, like the doctors who
conducted the selections. Only in Auschwitz did modern, well-designed crematoria become the sites of
continuous murder. These buildings offered in their logical arrangement of undressing rooms, gas chambers,
and crematoria ovens a carefully thought-out production facility of death. As the question of the beneficial
and/or perditious nature of modernity lies at the heart of our interpretation of the twentieth century, the
modernity of Auschwitz places it at the center. 13
71 HOLOCAUST EDUCATION IN PEDAGOGY, HISTORY, AND PRACTICE
4 Iconography
The crematoria, with their chimneys, were also powerful symbolic images of destruction. In the Jewish
memory of the genocide, the traditional symbolic images of fire and smoke, which are associated with
the stake on which Jews were burnt in earlier times, predominate. Hence also the ease with which first
English-speaking Jews and later Jews in the diaspora as a whole accepted the term “Holocaust” as the
proper way to refer to the murder of the six million. André Schwarz-Bart’s novel The Last of the Just (1959)