The death camps of the Second World War remain inimitable on some impossibly cruel level. They were designed to liquidate and vanish an entire race of people, part of a broader racial war waged by the Third Reich. Others were also designated for a state-enforced disappearance: the Romani, political dissidents, homosexuals. But the language of Auschwitz-Birkenau, its desensitised approach to suffering, its rendering of suffering as inconsequential and bureaucratic, remains its most enduring and callous legacy.
The temptation with such an abomination is to see it as exceptional. The exceptional can be left there, in history, a reminder of barbarisms not to be repeated because they cannot be. Yet, even after the Second World War, the monstrous network of forced labour prisons within the Soviet system was still operating, one characterised by such places of sorrow as Siberia's Kolyma. China under Mao Zedong enacted policies in terms of collectivisation and repression that cost the deaths of millions.
The very idea of seeing Auschwitz as having any bearing on state cruelty and barbarism after 1945 has been seen as problematic, even disagreeable by those who defend its unique standing. Holocaust scholars such as Steven Katz insist that comparisons between the Nazi death camp and the Gulag are flawed. 'In their design, empirical facticity, intentionality, and teleology, they are radically alternative forms of manipulation, violence and death.' By all means, be aware of a certain 'primal ethical similarity' between them, but do so from the perspective of commencing the conversation rather than seeing it as a conclusion.
Katz's reasons are sound to a point. They can be seen as a response to the equivalency school or, even more disconcerting, a comparative school of reasoning that sought to minimise the savagely distinct efforts of the Third Reich in perpetrating the Holocaust relative to the totalitarian regimes of Communism.
In one extreme form, it assumed that Nazi brutality and its extermination program were direct responses to Bolshevik ideology, a point made most controversially by the late German historian Ernst Nolte in The European Civil War 1917-1945: National Socialism and Bolshevism (1987). The result was a famous, barbed conflict of historiography and ethics known as the Historikerstreit ('historians dispute').
At the centre of this lies a paradox; to acknowledge the death camp as sui generis has the consequence of suggesting that it can never be repeated, even if commemorative ceremonies should still be held every year. We are to remember the appalling nature of the event, draw lessons, and then go about our business in the knowledge that our societies are decent, our leaders generally palatable.
To suggest, however, that its dastardly spirit can be animated in modern states, even those purporting to be democratic in some way, suggests a cheapening and even dangerous trivialisation of it. The logic that follows is this: Modern states might be cruel but not that cruel. In a sense, Auschwitz's legacy risks an odd sort of mummification, to be gazed upon from time to time as haunting reminder and didactic instruction.
"Such a state of affairs enables the Australian state to maintain an oppressive, prison style system that anonymises and, at least in a legal and symbolic way, 'vanishes' refugees held on Manus Island and Nauru."
The truly tragic nature of Auschwitz lies in the deeper reasons of a common tradition that links civilisation to its destructive impulses, one characterised by insensitive bureaucracies, filing, trains and timetabling. Civilisational triumph is often genocidal.
The effort to understand Auschwitz and the Holocaust more generally as constructions, less of unique evil than of the common mineral of a vicious totalitarianism, came from Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). But Katz cannot accept this, seeing the effort 'to portray Stalinism and Nazism as two forms of a common reality called "Totalitarianism"' as 'seriously flawed'.
Governments of various countries dedicate much time to the idea of Auschwitz the unique, the singular, the outrageously sui generis. There are envoys specifically tasked with commemorative duties. Whole budgets are set aside for the task. Remembrance alliances keep busy. The 75th anniversary was one such occasion. This is a fine thing to do, but it enables those same governments to ignore other mandated cruelties that arise from their workings.
Australia can be proud to observe the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust. Individuals such as Eddie Jaku, almost a centurion, featured in coverage by SBS. 'Auschwitz is a death camp. I'm very lucky. I think I'm a miracle because I survived.'
The nature of such occasions also serves another purpose: to forget what remotely comparable features of an oppressive state might look like, be it in terms of ethnic cleansing (Myanmar) or the treatment meted out to refugees. Auschwitz remains a memory and, perversely enough, less relevant for that.
Such a state of affairs enables the Australian state to maintain an oppressive, prison style system that anonymises and, at least in a legal and symbolic way, 'vanishes' refugees held on Manus Island and Nauru. Its bureaucratic mechanisms justify holding individuals in indefinite administrative detention. This is cosmically far from saying that these are equivalent matters to the death camps of the Holocaust. But if we are to be serious about acknowledging the depravity of Auschwitz, its origins, its civilisational horrors, we can at least take the lead from Katz on starting the conversation on why such events take place and do remain chillingly relevant.
Dr Binoy Kampmark is a former Commonwealth Scholar who lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Main image: A member of a delegation of survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp and their families breaks into tears at the execution wall at the former Auschwitz I site on 27 January 2020. International leaders and approximately 200 survivors and their families gathered at Auschwitz to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the camp's liberation. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)