The Holocaust deniers claim: “There is a swimming pool at Auschwitz I, used by prisoners. There were also a brothel, an orchestra, a football pitch, a library and a theatre. A camp with these facilities cannot have been a death camp. The standard accounts ignore the recreational facilities that the prisoners actually used.”
The swimming pool exists. It was built in summer 1944 by prisoner labour at Auschwitz I, the main camp, and was used for SS recreation, and on rare occasion by selected privileged prisoners (kapos and skilled workers needed by the SS). The brothel exists; it was opened at Auschwitz I in 1943 as part of an SS-wide initiative across the camp system to incentivise certain categories of prisoner with sexual access to enslaved Jewish and non-Jewish women, who had been forcibly assigned to the work. The orchestra, the football pitch, the library and the theatre likewise existed. None of them refutes the killing operation, all of which took place at Birkenau, three kilometres away, where there were no swimming pools and no orchestras and no football pitches because there were no prisoners to use them; the people who arrived at Birkenau were dead within hours.
What the swimming pool was
The swimming pool at Auschwitz I, sometimes called the “fire reservoir” because its dual purpose was as a static water supply for fire-fighting in the camp, was built in 1944 by Kommando 35, a prisoner labour detachment. It is a square concrete tank approximately 25 by 8 metres, with a diving platform at one end. It was used by the SS garrison for recreation and physical training. It was used very occasionally, on specific permission, by prisoners, almost all of them members of the kapo class or of skilled trades that the SS valued (the camp orchestra, certain medical personnel, and similar). The Auschwitz museum displays the pool today with explanatory signage describing exactly what it was. The denier presentation as a recreational facility for prisoners generally is not what the records or the surviving testimony describe.
The pool was at Auschwitz I, the main camp, which was the labour-camp section of the complex (with approximately 16,000 to 20,000 registered prisoners at any time), distinct from Birkenau (which had a registered labour-camp population of approximately 50,000 to 60,000 plus the killing complex of crematoria II, III, IV and V). The killing did not happen at Auschwitz I in any significant volume after summer 1942; it happened at Birkenau. Birkenau had no swimming pool, no orchestra, no library, no theatre. The prisoners who arrived at Birkenau and were sent to the gas chambers had no opportunity to use any facility because they were not in the camp; they were dead.
The brothel
The Auschwitz brothel, opened in October 1943 in Block 24 of the main camp, was one of about ten brothels established across the SS camp system between 1942 and 1944. The system was Himmler’s idea: to incentivise non-Jewish prisoners performing skilled labour by offering controlled access to enslaved women. The women were taken, generally from Ravensbrück (the women’s camp), with promises of better conditions; almost all were prostituted under coercion and most were killed or sent back to Ravensbrück when their usefulness expired. The brothels were not available to Jewish prisoners. The system has been studied in detail by Robert Sommer in his 2009 monograph Das KZ-Bordell; it is part of the documented history of the camp system, not a denial of it.
The denier framing presents the brothel as evidence of leisure and welfare. It was the opposite. It was a system of organised sexual slavery for the women involved, and a privilege accessible only to a thin layer of non-Jewish prisoners, mostly kapos and trustees, used by the SS as part of the system of differential reward that kept the camp’s internal hierarchy operating. It does not refute the killing operation any more than the swimming pool does.
The orchestra and the football
The Auschwitz orchestras (there were three: the men’s orchestra at Auschwitz I, the women’s orchestra at Birkenau and a small orchestra at the Birkenau Gypsy camp) existed because the SS wanted them to. The men’s orchestra played at the camp gate as the labour columns marched out in the morning and back in the evening, providing rhythm for the prisoners’ march and a kind of ceremonial backdrop for the SS supervision. The women’s orchestra at Birkenau, the only such formation in any camp, was conducted by Alma Rosé (Mahler’s niece) and similarly played for SS purposes including, on occasion, at the platform during transport arrivals. The orchestras were a privilege for the musicians (longer life expectancy than other prisoners) and a tool for the SS. The musicians’ surviving testimony, including Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s memoir Inherit the Truth, describes both functions clearly.
The Auschwitz football pitch is referred to in some prisoner accounts. SS-supervised matches were played among prisoner teams at the main camp on certain Sundays. The matches were occasions of organised entertainment for the SS audience. They did not contradict the killing operation any more than playing football contradicted the death camps.
The categories the deniers conflate
The deniers conflate the labour-camp section of Auschwitz I, where surviving registered prisoners did exist and did, very occasionally, use the limited facilities the SS made available, with the killing operation at Birkenau, where the people sent to the gas chambers had no facilities of any kind because they were not registered prisoners. The conflation is the same one used by the “labour camps not death camps” claim. The presence of a swimming pool used by SS personnel and a thin layer of privileged prisoners at the labour-camp section does not change anything about what happened at the gas chambers. The people who were killed at Birkenau did not see the swimming pool. They saw the railway siding, the selection platform, and the gas chamber.
Why the claim is harmful
The claim is harmful because it picks specific items from the labour-camp infrastructure and uses them to imply that the entire complex was benign. The implication does not survive contact with the actual operational geography of Auschwitz: the labour camp at Auschwitz I, the labour camp at Birkenau, and the killing complex at Birkenau were three different places with three different functions. The swimming pool was at Auschwitz I; the killing was at Birkenau; the people killed never saw the pool. The denial requires the listener to forget the geographical and functional distinction. It is the trick of presenting the parts of the system that some prisoners survived as the whole of the system, while the parts where almost no one survived are quietly omitted.
Where was the swimming pool? Where were the gas chambers? How far apart, and operationally how connected?
See also
Sources
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, on-site signage and museum guidebook material on the swimming pool, Block 24 brothel, orchestras and other Auschwitz I facilities
- Robert Sommer, Das KZ-Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern, Schöningh, 2009, the standard scholarly study of the SS brothel system
- Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth 1939 to 1945: The Documented Experiences of a Survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen, Giles de la Mare, 1996
- Fania Fénelon, Playing for Time, Atheneum, 1977, on the women’s orchestra at Birkenau
- Richard Newman with Karen Kirtley, Alma Rosé: From Vienna to Auschwitz, Amadeus Press, 2000
- Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz, English edition, University of North Carolina Press, 2004, on the structure of camp society and the differential treatment of registered prisoners versus those killed on arrival
- Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press / USHMM, 1994, with chapters on the operational geography
- Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Yale University Press, 1996
- Wachsmann, Nikolaus, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015, on the brothel and incentive systems across the camp network
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, “The Camp’s Swimming Pool” and “Block 24”, https://www.auschwitz.org
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Auschwitz” and “Forced Sexual Labor in Nazi Camps”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org