(Mirror. This takes 3¾–6¼ minutes to read.)

At a meeting of the international leadership of the underground communist party at Monowitz, an Auschwitz subcamp, the four members were discussing the meaning of resistance. “The main goal is to contribute to the defeat of Hitler,” declared the French Bellini. The Polish member contradicted: “That’s just a phrase. […] Hitler wants to kill, and we are preventing some of the killing. That’s the main point of our struggle here.”

But that, too, is an oversimplification, they agreed: “Hitler doesn’t just want to kill, he also wants us to produce profit to support his war industry. If we all survived, but worked obediently for the I. G. [Farben], we could not say we were fighting against Hitler.”¹

This scene is from the Auschwitz memoir of Oszkár Betlen (1909–1969), a Hungarian communist, first published in 1959. The protagonists are not fictional as they represent prominent figures of the Auschwitz resistance: the German Stefan Heymann (1896–1967), the Polish Leon Stasiak (1915–2000), the French Robert Waitz (1900–1978), named Bellini in the memoir, and Betlen himself.²

They all had been members of antifascist organizations before their deportation to Monowitz, IG Farben’s corporate concentration camp that provided workforce for the IG Auschwitz plant. Despite their dispute at the committee meeting, they agreed on the inherently economic nature of fascist aggression. In one way or another, they all continued their fight against fascism after the liberation of the camps.

[…]

Baum’s Resistance in Auschwitz, first published in the same year, 1949, and then expanded and revised in 1957 and 1962, respectively, described the Auschwitz-complex as a culmination of extreme exploitation in modern history.²² Ultimately, he defined Auschwitz as an outcome of converging political and economic interests of the [Fascist] state, the military, and the industry—a position no doubt representative of the dominant communist interpretation of the era. As a consequence, Baum infused his report on Auschwitz with demands for economic restructuring, West German demilitarization, and the prosecution of large corporations.

Among the latter, especially Siemens played a prominent rôle first in his life as a worker, a communist organizer, then as a prisoner in Auschwitz, and later as a politician and memoirist. As a young man, he worked for Siemens until 1933 when he lost his employment due to membership in the Berlin chapter of the Young Communist League of Germany (KJVD).

According to a 1954 vita, in 1935 he was again engaged in a “workers’ wage struggle” at Siemens when he was arrested by the SS which ultimately led to his imprisonment and deportation.²³ Working as an electrician in Auschwitz, he then witnessed how Siemens supplied the camp with electric equipment, including some used in the crematoria, as he recalled in his memoir.²⁴

Nonetheless, Resistance in Auschwitz reads as a report on Auschwitz rather than as a personal story of struggle and survival. His own story is inserted almost as an appendix to a sequence of historical documents, quoted in order to substantiate the rôle of [Fascist] corporations in genocide (29). It is in that context that he recalls his personal experiences of deportation, especially the shock of arrival, forced labour, and the proximity of mass murder, as a proof of [Fascist] policies of exploitation and genocide.

[…]

As if in response to Baum’s call, Betlen framed his 1959 Auschwitz memoir, Life in the Land of Death, as a story of resistance against IG Farben, the embodiment of fascist war industry. Betlen sets off the story in October 1942 when together with a larger group of inmates he was transferred to Auschwitz from Buchenwald where he had spent the previous three years. “We are going to build Buna, IG Farben’s big chemical plant,”²⁵ they learned upon their arrival.

Throughout the book Betlen makes it all too clear that forced labour in the camp served war interests as “the IG, the German war industry needs healthy prisoners” (216). He portrays the Monowitz camp as the essence of fascism characterized not simply by the exploitation of the workforce, but by racial classification and oppression: “[Hitler] painted the Poles with the letter “P,” marked the Ukrainians with “Ost,” and sewed a star on the clothes of the Jews. He chained almost the whole of Europe, and classified its peoples into inferior and more inferior” (323).

[…]

At the same time, Baum interpreted the Jewish genocide in the wider context of [Fascist] imperialism. For him, the genocide presented a prelude to the prospective exploitation of Eastern Europe. The “facilities of Auschwitz,” including Birkenau and the sub-camps, demonstrated for him that “the purpose of Auschwitz was to become a site of extermination for European Jewry and, after the victory of Nazism, to harness the labour of a steady half-million workforce before their extermination.”³⁰

Similarly, Betlen regarded the Jewish genocide as an experiment for future practices in a [Fascist]-occupied Europe.³¹ For him, the purpose of antifascist organizing was to protect “people from being reduced to numbered slaves […], nations from being classified into superiors and inferiors; deprived and prosperous, oppressed and oppressor.”³²

Again, merely rejecting the celebratory tone of some of these passages as propaganda misses the point. Baum, Betlen, and Langbein regarded racial persecution and economic exploitation as equally key aspects of fascism. If Marxist theory in the 1940s and 1950s was “characterized by its silence on Auschwitz,” and on the Holocaust in particular,³³ this was hardly the case for Marxist antifascist culture of the same period.

Not only was the Holocaust not silenced; the [Axis’s] genocide of the Jews had a constitutive place in these communist-antifascist memoirs of Auschwitz. The genocide was seen as an extreme form of fascist aggression and condemned in the name of a consistently antiracist view of humanity.