Eva Kor is a victim of the Holocaust who speaks around the country, and in her message of forgiveness she tells a story about meeting with the officer at Auschwitz who looked into the chamber during the gassing, watched all the victims die, then signed a single death certificate. What was the purpose of these certificates? They seem a little humanizing in such a horrific process, and certainly more callous methods could have been used to track deaths. Can anyone clarify their purpose?
It was not really meant to be humanizing – the basic purpose of having death certificates issued in such a situation was, simply, record-keeping. What I mean is that the process of the Holocaust didn't really stop what was considered proper bureaucratic procedure before it started. Death certificates were necessary to be issued because the German Reich was through legal provisions the sole heir of a Holocaust victim's possessions and what was left of their financial means. Also, in case of a prisoner of Auschwitz being forced to perform forced labor, the employing firm, e.g. IG Farben, had to pay the SS as well as the social insurance of the Reich. In order to make inheritance possible, to stop the social insurance from keeping a file on a certain prisoner, to have an overview of the labor force and number of prisoners in the camp, it was bureaucratically necessary to issue a death certificate, even it was only one that was a collective form.
The Auschwitz camps had their own Standesamt, the German state agency responsible for keeping track of births, deaths and marriages. While since its inception the Standesamt in the camp was a subagency of the nearest civilian Standesamt in the town of Auschwitz (Oswiecim) with another sub-office in Bielitz. On January 1, 1943 the Auschwitz Standesamt via order from the camp commander became an independent Standesamt, responsible for the entire area of the Auschwitz concentration camps and their sub camps. It was called "Standesamt II Auschwitz". It continued a practice established before when it had only been a dependence of the larger Standesamt, namely employing prisoners from the camp such as 24 female Jewish prisoners responsible for the record keeping there.
Not all of the records of this Standesamt are still available, e.g. the collective gas chamber death certificates have most likely been destroyed but we have the death records from the Auschwitz Stammlager and partly from Buchenwald from 1942, which is before the real start of the mass killing in Birkenau. This one however also only contains the deaths of registered prisoners, meaning not the Jews deported and killed upon arrival. Their death records are most likely lost to history.
The records of the Auschwitz Standesamt also contain the record of one marriage. Rudolf Friemel was an Austrian who had fought in the International Brigades in Spain. During his time there he had married Margarita Ferrer y Ray, a Spanish national. After the Spanish Civil War he was interned in France and after the fall of France deported to German concentration camps, ending up in Auschwitz. Neither Spain nor Germany recognized marriages made in the Spanish Republic, so Friemel, as a then German political prisoner, applied for permission to re-marry Ferrer y Ray. After lengthy legal deliberation, the civil court in Kattowitz decided with the RSHA giving their assent too to grant permission and so Margarita went to Auschwitz together with Friemel's brother to marry him again at the Standesamt in Standesamt in Oswiecim.
As I mentioned above, issuing of these certificates, especially the death certificates was a necessary legal formality. According to German law, that was adopted/imposed in various occupied territories, Jews were not full citizens but rather something that can be translated to "legal wards" (Schutzbefeohlene). These legal provisions mandated that once Jews left the territory they were were legal wards of, they would lose not only their protection but also all legal claims to their possessions and things like social insurance and so forth would revert to the Reich instead to an heir of their choosing. Basically, once the Reich deported a Jew, it became their sole heir and beneficiary. In order to claim these possessions and take advantage of their status as beneficiary, a death certificate was necessary for even if it was a Reich agency, a social insurance, notary, and so forth would still need a death certificate to initiate the necessary legal procedures. Hence, someone needed to issue them.
So, how can we conceptualize this: Massive extra-judicial killing on part of the state (murder of Jews was never legalized in Germany) but state agencies still insisting on proper bureaucratic procedure. One historian and theoretician who tried to explain this was Ernst Fraenkel in his book The Dual State, originally published in 1940/41. Fraenkel, a jurist by training, had been forced to flee Germany because of his Jewish heritage and socialist leanings and he was one of the first people trying to really grasp the political system of Nazis.
In his book Fraenkel posits that the Nazi system is marked by the simultaneous existence of a normative and prerogative state. The normative state as defined by Fraenkel is what we generally would classify as a state under the rule of law, meaning that like we are used to, every action taken by the state is based on laws (in democracy we generally accept that the state can only do what is explicitly conferred to him as part of the legal framework). The prerogative state on the other hand is the state that takes actions not based on law but based on situational-political expediencies in line with ideological goals.
Fraenkel points out that things like private law, relations of property, torts, contracts and so forth still functioned like they had before in the Third Reich with laws regulating them. with courts deciding disputes and with the state administrations decisions still being binding – except where it concerned the Jews and thus fell under the prerogative states mandate. While there was a slew of anti-Jewish legislation, the way state agencies, courts, and so forth acted towards Jews and subsequently against their murdered in most situations was not guided by legal norms very much in place in other cases but solely by political and situational expediency.
While in many situations the state continues to function as it has previously functioned, in certain areas, agencies like the Gestapo and others are completely freed from legal and other restraints in their actions – but this applies only to where the Nazi state saw political expedience to do so. So while the Gestapo could act without impunity, others could not – German civilians couldn't just beat a Jew to death on the streets and Stnadesämter or other state agencies couldn't just stop issuing or requiring death or borth certificated.
The prerogative state is the superior of the two because it can supersede the normative state where it's wielders feel appropriate. At the same time the prerogative state is dependent upon the normative state, not just because without a normative state a capitalist economy would simply cease to function (to be able to gauge the consequences of one's actions and enjoy legal protection for a contract e.g. is essential to how capitalist economies function) but also to elicit the collaboration of the traditional state authorities in the ideological mission of the new state.
The important lesson from this is that states and societies function by en large via fiat: Once citizens and bureaucrats, judges, police men and so forth start losing faith in the state's ability to function, a state effectively stops to function because it is impossible to sustain a social system in the long run without the people's faith in it. Even massive violence requires those who exact that violence in the name of the state. And so, the normative state is important because to the privileged group that enjoys its application to them it is essential to maintain the fiat in the functioning of the system as a whole. It is important to the system as a whole to still execute laws in normative way where the privileged majority is concerned in order to maintain the faith in the system necessary to institute the prerogative state measures against the marginalized and oppressed groups.
Sources:
Nicholaus Wachsmann: KL. A History of the Concentration Camps.
Ernst Fraenkel: The Dual State.
Thomas Grotum: Das digitale Archiv: Aufbau und Auswertung einer Datenbank zur Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Auschwitz.
I've seen two main explanations for the continuing creation of death certificates for certain prisoners at Auschwitz.
First of all, remember that Auschwitz was built in 1940, before the "Final solution" and it's most horrible form, Operation Reinhard, were embarked upon. The very first prisoners at Auschwitz were Germans, not Jews. As such, their deaths would normally be registered in a well-functioning Prussian bureaucracy - the highest aspiration of the Nazis. One explanation, then, is that it was simple habit and a pretense at keeping up the normal operations of society. These imprisoned men and women had free, upstanding German relatives who could ask the state and be informed that their kin had unfortunately died in a labor camp. This charade was actively helped by vague or incorrect information in the death certificates, such as giving false causes of death (old age, disease, suicide), and describing the place of death as occurring on "Kasernestraße, Auschwitz" rather than at the camp proper.
The second, more sinister reason, was that the Nazis themselves were Holocaust deniers. Camp arrivals taken aside for extermination were referred to as receiving "Sonderbehandlung", or special treatment. This could often happen within hours or days if the camp was full - and these poor individuals would as a rule not receive a death certificate at all. In theory, then, the camp commander could pretend that this was only a labor camp, perhaps with some forced labor, where a reasonable proportion of inmates survived for extended periods, and those who died of disease were duly recorded. For the best-treated prisoners at the camp, this was no fiction - some of them survived for years.
In later times, holocaust deniers have used the Auschwitz death books in this very way - by claiming that the deaths recorded therein (some 70 000) are the only ones who died in the camp during the timeframe covered by the books.
Sources: