Word: auschwitz
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Indians in 1919 and, without warning, they killed 379 people with rifle fire. The Germans bombed and machine-gunned to death 1,600 people of the tiny town of Guernica, Spain, in 1937, rounded up and shot 200,000 Jews at Babi Yar in 1941. And there was Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau...
...plays that followed The Constant Prince (TIME, Oct. 24) were Akropolis and Apocalypsis cum Figuris. Akropolis contains a staggering irony in its title, for it is actually about Auschwitz. The title is an implicit judgment on a civilization that plummets from its zenith to its lowest depths. The inmates of the death camp spend most of the evening dumping each other in and out of wheelbarrows, piecing together homely sections of stovepipe and finally, one by one, entering a crematorium. The playgoer's knowledge that the pipes that the members of the cast have strung about the stage will...
...wouldn't be alive today. "Oh no, says he, "that was in Europe." His attitude then explains, I think, a great deal about his writing now: the glib, absurd equation of Hitler's factories of death and the war in Vietnam; the facile postmortem advice to the Jews of Auschwitz and Treblinka (they should have fought, he thinks, precisely because it would have made no difference) from someone who writes that the only reason he wouldn't blow up the Center for International Affairs is that he might get caught...
Such absolutist considerations had little to do with the actual proceedings against the Nazis, both for war crimes and denazification in general. These were, as FitzGibbon notes, much tainted by expediency and confusion. In practical terms, too, their results have been mixed. Ironically, some of the criminals of Auschwitz got off "extremely lightly" because the rules of evidence, which the Nazis had scrapped, had been reimposed in the name of justice by the Allies. Most Nazis were soon issued their Persilscheine ("whitewash slips," a name derived from a brand of soap powder). Modern Germany is run by the Persils...
...advised Speer never to accept an invitation to visit a concentration camp in Upper Silesia. He had seen things there, he said, that he dared not describe. "I did not pursue the matter. I did not want to know what was happening there. He must have been talking about Auschwitz. From that moment on, I was inextricably involved in these crimes because, out of fear that I might discover something which would have forced me to certain steps, I shut my eyes. Because I failed then, I still today feel very personally responsible for Auschwitz...