Diseño de la instalación fotovoltaica

Cremation still relatively modern in the 1930s and 1940s. Resistance by many social elements gives rise to bizarre ideas of concealing crimes and corpse recycling. —National Socialism advocates cremation because of overcrowd- ing and disease control. —Cremation fears mirrored in many instances of Allied fear about German secret weapons, technological abilities. —Fear of poison gas and its disfiguring effects common in interwar culture. —Vicki Baum. —Pabst’s Kameradschaft. —Poison gas and mass hysteria: Israel, 1991; Florida, 1971; D-Day, 1944; the “War of the Worlds” panic of 1938. —Disfigured bodies, from fire or putrefaction, are conceived as victims of

poison gas: Germany, Kassel bombing raid, 1943; concentration camps, 1945. —Poison gas often conceived as airborne: German civil defense.

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he modern advocacy of cremation was only about sixty years old by the time the National Socialist dictatorship began.385 _{Two factors tended to support}

the procedure: a chronic lack of burial space, and hygienic requirements, including disease control.386 _{On the other hand, the procedure inspired sometimes violent}

opposition, largely because it conflicted strongly with both Christian and Jewish conceptions of body disposal and the hopes of the afterlife.387 _{As a result, the devel-}

opment of the procedure in the twentieth century was slow.388

Advocacy of the process increased throughout the late nineteenth and early twen- tieth century, especially in Germany, where it was associated with rationality, mo- dernity, and public health.389 _{By the beginning of the 1920s, less than 2 percent of}

the deceased in Germany were cremated, but by 1930 that number had increased to over 7 percent.390 _{The National Socialist government gave its support to the process}

by the law of 1934, placing cremation on the same level as more traditional burial practices.391 _{Many have commented subsequently on the rapid development of}

the practice, and have noted that it represents the “full mechanization” of modern life,392 _{and as such, a strong rupture with traditional life. What needs to be appre-}

ciated, however, is that rapid changes in how people live also affect how they per- ceive the life they are living: no doubt many of the fearful perceptions of cremation were related to that rapid cultural change which shook traditional faiths393_—”The

modern world is an anti-Christian world,” so wrote the leader of German Social Democracy, August Bebel, in 1884, who, in accordance with his will, was cremated in 1913.394

Probably as a result of these anxieties about cremation, the procedure became the focus of a number of strange ideas. One of these was that cremation was suspicious, because by burning a body a post mortem on the cause of death would be made

385 On the subject of cremation’s reemergence, see Kenneth Iserson, Death to Dust; Norbert Fischer, Vom Gottesacker zum

Krematorium; and see also Sir Henry Thompson, entry “Cremation” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed.

386 Compare Thompson, “Cremation.”

387 Thompson explores this theme in particular, but it is something of a truism in writings about cremation.

388 Although Germany built the first modern crematorium, actual use was hindered by social attitudes; consult Thompson, “Cremation.”

389 Fischer, Vom Gottesacker zum Krematorium, 96.

390 Ibid., 116. The increase in cremation rates in traditionally Protestant venues was even greater. In Hamburg it climbed from 2.8 percent to 27.8 percent between 1913 and 1930.

391 Ibid., 11.

392 Ibid., 124, and also quoting Siegfried Giedion, 101.

393 Ibid., 116, also 99 for typical exaggerations and hostile reactions, particularly from churches, to the process. 394 Ibid., 115. His actual words were “Die moderne Kultur ist eine antichristliche Kultur,” which Fischer characterizes as anti-clericalism, and probably correctly. Nevertheless, bearing in mind the psychic investment which most people have made in traditional religions, to construe his words as “Modern culture is the culture of the Antichrist” would probably not exaggerate the way in which many regarded such attitudes.

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next to impossible to carry out.395 _{Under such conditions, all manner of murder,}

poisoning, and other activities could be carried out secretly.396 _{It was this element}

that clearly excited the German people, especially after the National Socialist gov- ernment not only endorsed cremation for an overcrowded Germany but also made it mandatory in all concentration camps.397

A second aspect of cremation concerned utopian and futuristic ideas of recycling. Aldous Huxley would clearly articulate the idea in his negative utopia Brave New

World in 1932:

Following [the train’s] southerly course across the dark plain their eyes were drawn to the majestic buildings of the Slough Crematorium. For the safety of night flying planes, its four tall chimneys were flood-lighted and tipped with crimson danger signals. It was a landmark.

“Why do the smoke-stacks have those things like balconies around them?” en- quired Lenina.

“Phosphorous recovery,” explained Henry telegraphically. “On their way up the chimney the gases go through four separate treatments. P₂O₅ used to go right out the chimney. Now they recover over 98 percent of it. More than a kilo and a half per adult corpse. Which makes the best part of four hundred tons of phosphorous from England alone.” Henry spoke with a happy pride, rejoicing whole-heartedly in the achievement, as though it had been his own. “Fine to think that we can go on being socially useful even after we’re dead. Making plants grow.”398

Cremation was not only associated with recycling and various sinister motiva- tions. Some of the claims made about the process can be compared to various other fantastic claims made about German technological and even medical inno- vations which were typical during the war and in the immediate postwar period. For example, it was claimed by the Soviets at Nuremberg that German doctors had perfected a method of infecting people with cancer,399 _{and General Patton, in his}

memoirs, seemed to take seriously a claim that a German doctor had been able to keep a brain alive, separated from its host.400 _{When a plan for a German space}

station was uncovered—a development which made sense in terms of the German space program—it was reported in the American press as a plan for a platform that would use a giant mirror to reflect the sun’s rays back to the earth in concentrated form in order to incinerate cities or boil “part of the ocean.”401 _{Speculation about}

395 Iserson, Death to Dust; Thompson, “Cremation.” 396 Iserson, Death to Dust; Thompson, “Cremation.”

397 Fischer, Vom Gottesacker zum Krematorium, 115. Here we mean “mandatory” in the sense that from 1939 virtually every concentration camp would be equipped with cremation facilities.

398 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 48.

399 The Soviet Special Commission on Auschwitz, USSR-008.

400 George S. Patton, Jr., War As I Knew It, 284. Patton probably got the idea from Donovan’s Brain, a 1942 novel by Curt Siodmak, a Dresdener of Polish Jewish stock and brother of the director Robert Siodmak, which pioneered the idea of brains surviving out of bodily context, and in turn probably inspired Madmen of Mandoras (1963, aka They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1966)), as well as other fantasies of rejuvenating Hitler, e.g., Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil.

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the development of the so-called “Sun Gun” was matched by the hysteria of Allied pilots who, from fall 1944 on, began to report small balls of fire tracking their air- craft over Germany. These “Foo Fighters” or “Kraut Balls” were said to be remote- controlled flying objects sent up by the Germans to sabotage the electrical systems of Allied planes; although they appear to have been nothing more unusual than St. Elmo’s fire.402

In our opinion, the attitudes about German crematoriums in the 1930s and 1940s clearly reflect this kind of technological hysteria, largely because of the fantastic burn rates attributed to German crematoriums or other techniques in the realm of body disposal. It was not uncommon during the immediate postwar period to hear testimonies asserting that German cremation ovens could burn thousands of people in a single day,403 _{or that the Germans had devised a “special procedure”}

for burning thousands of bodies in the open air without fuel,404 _{just as one could}

hear testimonies arguing that thousands of people could be packed into a space for gassing which normally would scarcely contain hundreds by use of “the German method.”405

Notwithstanding a well-known document concerning Auschwitz that suggests that bodies could be burned to ash in fifteen or twenty minutes,406 _{the facts, devel-}

oped by the Italian researcher Carlo Mattogno, are simply otherwise. The crema- tion of a body has a thermal barrier of about 40 minutes for the reduction of body proteins and about 20 to 30 minutes more to reduce the bones to ash.407 _Bearing

in mind these facts, derived in empirical tests by British cremationists in recent years,408 _{we are forced to conclude that the daily capacity of German crematoriums}

is more realistically measured in the several dozens or, at most, hundreds rather than the several thousands.409 _{It follows also that the existence of crematoriums}

cannot be cited as evidence of an intent to exterminate, as was argued then, even though that claim is still encountered from time to time to this day.410

most particularly to science fiction and UFO hysterias, has been the subject of a number of credulous studies, but the theme has not received the mainstream academic exposure that it deserves, perhaps because these hysterical postwar claims flow right back to the kinds of claims repeatedly made about the extermination processes in the camps.

402 Renato Vesco and David Hatcher Childress, Man-Made UFOs 1944–1994, 77-87. See also Brad Harris, Die dunkle Seite

des Mondes, vol. 1, 119-174, for a more extensive discussion of the legend of German secret weapons and Nazi UFOs.

403 Specifically, the Soviet Special Commission on Auschwitz claimed that 279,000 people could be cremated by the 56 Auschwitz Birkenau ovens in a month, i.e., 9,300 per day. Some eyewitnesses, e. g., Nyiszli, assert even higher rates of combustion.

404 Testimony of Dr. Konrad Morgen, August 7, 1946, IMT, vol. 20.

405 Cross-examination of Dr. Bendel, Tesch-Weinbacher Trial, Public Records Office, London, WO235/83.

406 A document of dubious provenance (marked as a copy (“Abschrift”), reproduced in one of its forms by Pressac,

Auschwitz: Technique and Operation, 244, asserts half that amount. Neither number is credible because neither is possible, as

even Pressac admits. The document is discussed in “Bomb Shelters in Birkenau,”Section 1.4, elsewhere in this volume. 407 Carlo Mattogno, “The Crematoria Ovens of Auschwitz and Birkenau” in Rudolf, ed., Dissecting the Holocaust, 373-412. 408 Mattogno, in “The Crematoria Ovens,” cites “Factors Which Affect the Process of Cremation,” third session, by Dr. E. W. Jones, assisted by Mr. R. G. Williamson, Annual Cremation Conference Report, Cremation Society of Great Britain, 1975. It should be stressed that all of the surviving documentation on mass cremations in German camps, cited by Pressac,

Auschwitz: Technique and Operation; Mattogno, “The Crematoria Ovens”; and Pressac (with van Pelt), “The Machinery of

Mass Murder at Auschwitz,” in Gutman and Berenbaum, Anatomy, 183-246, are of orders of magnitude that support the British conclusions. None support the extravagant cremation rates argued by Pressac, e.g., in “Machinery,” 199.

409 Mattogno, “The Crematoria Ovens.”

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To a certain extent the German leadership is responsible for encouraging the Allies to make exaggerated claims about German technological prowess. The con- stant talk of wonder weapons that would turn the tide of war helped maintain home front morale. On the other hand, such claims, coupled with the very real German innovations in weapons technology, including jet aircraft, rocket planes, cruise missiles, guided missiles, and many others, were bound to lead the Allies to believe that the “latest word in fascist technology”411 _{would have no limits, and}

thus any claim became plausible: even crematoriums that could defy the laws of nature, or which were in fact “gas ovens.”412 _{The undercurrents of fear and anxiety}

in these superstitious attributions of diabolical skill to one’s enemy are, we believe, easily seen.

There were also cases where the Nazi leadership, and specifically Adolf Hitler, would attempt to gain a psychological advantage by exaggerating German techno- logical capabilities. For example, when the Germans invaded Belgium in May 1940, they seized the fortress of Eben Emael in twenty-four hours, much to the astonish- ment of the Allies. In a speech, Hitler attributed the success to a special weapon or

Angriffsmittel, whose character he would not divulge. His coy announcement im-

mediately created apprehension among the Allies, as well as speculation about the nature of the wonder weapon: bombs containing liquid oxygen as well as a para- lyzing and nonlethal nerve gas were both suggested as possibilities.413 _{In fact, the}

legendary Angriffsmittel turned out to be nothing more complicated than a shaped explosive charge, but that does not mean that these other contemporary specula- tions are valueless to the historian. On the contrary, because they represent almost pure projection, they tell us a great deal about the widely held beliefs in German technological and scientific prowess as well as about then common concerns with specific types of weapons, including poison gas.

Even more than cremation, poison gas excited great fears. Doubtless much of this was directly due to the extensive use of gases in the First World War, which injured over a million men.414 _{A number of gases were used in that war, but two}

based on the facts that (a) a crematorium was planned for that Soviet city, and (b) Zyklon B was sent to that location. Breitman was indebted to Christian Gerlach, who originated the idea that the planned crematorium at Mogilev was some- how proof of an intent to establish an “extermination camp,” although both ignored the evidence that there were sizable typhus deaths at that location and that the bodies would have required cremation for purposes of public health (Christian Gerlach, “Failure of Plans for an SS Extermination Camp in Mogilev, Russia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 11, no. 1 (1997): 60-78). Breitman felt justified in rejecting that explanation by contending that Zyklon B was solely an agent of mass murder, as opposed to other Zyklon agents A, C, D, E, and F, whose existence Raul Hilberg had hypothesized in 1985. (Hilberg, Destruction (3rd ed.), 1000). However, this is wrong; there were no Zyklon types beyond A (the original gaseous product), B (absorbed cyanide in earthen pellets), and C (from 1943, identical to B but with a different warning agent). The error comes from Hilberg’s misreading of documents concerning the fumigation of belongings seized from Jews in the Riga area which described different concentrations of Zyklon, that is, grams per cubic meter, which were in the industrial jargon referred to as classes C–F.

411 A phrase from “The Factory of Death at Auschwitz” by Boris Polevoi, Pravda, February 2, 1945. The article has been separately translated into English and annotated at www.codoh.com.

412 The concept of “gas ovens” has been a particularly venerable one, such that the linkage of cremation, gas, and homicide has been considered well-nigh absolute. It is notable in this respect that, as previously noted, only four prosecution exhibits in the NMT concentration camp case pertained to possible gas chambers, but many more described the construction of crematoriums in the camps. Hence the latter has typically been used as proof of the former.

413 Time, May 20, 1940, 28.

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appear to have particularly excited the popular imagination. The first of these were the blister gases, or vesicants, commonly called mustards, which were notorious for scarring and disfiguring their victims.415 _{It was clearly this kind of gas that the}

German people were thinking of when the euthanasia rumors developed.

The second gas was hydrocyanic acid, or cyanide gas, whose usage in the war was not very successful, but which nevertheless created a very odd optimism about the use of this odorless, invisible, almost instantly lethal, and therefore painless gas.416

A practical side effect of this optimism was the appropriation of cyanide gas for executions in the United States in 1924.417

A brief perusal of interwar culture makes it clear that poison gas, and the effects of its use, were very much a part of the cultural landscape. The Austrian Vicki Baum’s novel, Grand Hotel, later made into a widely popular film in 1932, featured events in a Berlin hotel, narrated by a doctor whose face had been hideously scarred by mustard gas in the Great War.418 _{Pabst’s Kameradschaft (1931), a film that describes}

a group of German miners who bravely tunnel across the border to rescue their French comrades, features at its climax the hallucination of a wounded Frenchman, who suddenly sees the German trying to save him as a soldier, in gas mask and coal scuttle helmet, emerging from a cloud of gas. The film also juxtaposes the gas explosion in the mine that traps the Frenchmen to the communal shower room of the German miners: perhaps already here we have the popular image of showering and gas combined.419

In one of his better known assaults on the German bourgeoisie, the Weltbühne critic Kurt Tucholsky would casually mention gassing his opponents, sardonically describing the gas that would seep into the houses and kill children, women, and men alike.420 _{And Ernst Krenek, in his opera, Der Diktator (1926), which tells of a}

dictator who controls a nation with hypnotic powers, features a character blinded by poison gas who sings a lyric describing the horror of a poison gas attack, em- phasizing disfiguration and discoloration.421

This constant awareness of poison gas increased after the Italians made a much publicized, but perhaps overstated, use of aerial mustard gas attacks against the Ethiopians in 1935. H. G. Wells’ Things to Come, in the 1938 film version, would also feature such an aerial gas attack.422

several references. Also consult Dieter Martinetz, Der Gaskrieg, 1914–1918, for First World War use. For Second World War non-use, consult Crowell, “Technique”; also Gellermann, Der Krieg, der nicht stattfand; for groupings of documents and document extracts pertaining to gas warfare throughout the twentieth century see Hans Günther Brauch and Rolf-Dieter Müller, Chemische Kriegführung-Chemische Abrüstung; also Hahn, Waffen und Geheimwaffen, 223-235.

415 Crowell, “Technique.” 416 Ibid.

417 Trombley, Execution Protocol.

418 Grand Hotel, Edmund Goulding, director (1932). 419 Kameradschaft, Georg W. Pabst, director (1931). 420 Quoted by Stäglich, Auschwitz, 59.

421 Quoted in Johannes Riedel, “Echoes of Political Processes in Music during the Weimar Republic,” in Frank D. Hirschbach, Germany in the Twenties: The Artist as Social Critic.

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At the same time, in the fall of 1938, Europe was gripped by the threat of war as the Munich crisis unfolded. Fear of bombing was great, but so too was the fear of aerial poison gas attacks. The British government had prepared to distribute some thirty-eight million gas masks, and after the Fleet was mobilized on “Black Wednesday,” panic became a feature of gas mask distribution.423 _{Two other aspects}

of public attitudes during the crisis are worth noting: the proliferation of rumors such that, for example, a cloud of autumn mist might be interpreted as poison gas,424 _{and psychosomatic reactions, as when the rumor of a squadron spraying}

chlorine gas in East London caused the physical illness of several.425 _{Indeed, a gov-}

In document FRANCO AGUIRRE, ANDRÉS EMMANUEL (página 114-0)