Politics of Slave Labor

Description

The deportation of more than 400,000 Jews from Hungary to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp from mid-May to early July 1944 is said to have been the pinnacle of this camp’s extermination frenzy. It was allegedly followed in August 1944 by the extermination of more than 70,000 Jews deported from the Łódź Ghetto.

For the present book, the author has gathered from vast archival resources all the evidence available on both events. In painstaking research, the author proves almost on a person-by-person level what the fate was of many of the Jews deported from Hungary or the Łódź Ghetto.

In the case of the Jews deported from Hungary, it can be demonstrated that those among them who were deemed fit for forced-labor deployment – some 30% of all deported Jews – were indeed sent to forced-labor assignments throughout territories still under German control at that point in time. For the Łódź Ghetto, available documentation shows that almost all of these Jews were merely relocated, together with their production equipment. The challenge was to move them out of harm’s way of the invading Red Army.

Little documental or reliable anecdotal evidence exists about the fate of those Jews deported from Hungary who were classified as unfit for labor. This concerned mainly children together with their primary caregivers (usually their mothers) as well as the elderly and frail. Testimonies of third-party observers mainly from inside the Auschwitz Camp indicate that these Jews were slaughtered in the alleged homicidal gas chambers.

The claimed magnitude of this slaughter, with ten thousand and more victims every day, is said to have exceeded the Auschwitz crematoria’s capacity. Therefore, the majority of these victims were presumably burned on huge outdoor pyres. However, air photos taken by several reconnaissance missions of Allied air forces refute these claims, showing an entirely peaceful Auschwitz Camp during that time span. Hence, the available evidence points at brutal politics of slave labor rather than mass-murderous genocide.