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Iain Duncan Smith MP: Reflections on a visit to Auschwitz amid political crises back home

Conservative MPs Iain Duncan Smith (accompanied by Betsy), Andrew Rosindell, Angela Watkinson and Bob Neill - along with Jonathan Isaby of ConservativeHome - visited Auschwitz last Wednesday on a trip which was organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust as part of its Lessons from Auschwitz project. Here Iain Duncan Smith reflects on what he observed at the notorious Nazi death camp.

The alarm went off at 4am and I slowly heaved myself out of bed. Staring heavy eyed at the dark windows I cursed myself for having agreed that Betsy and I would take part in a visit to Auschwitz, as part of a Holocaust Educational Trust programme. There had been votes at the House of Commons until way past midnight and the two hours sleep I had managed to grab only made me feel worse. As we raced for the flight, I silently questioned the need for my visit: I had so much work to do and couldn’t spare a day away. After all, I had always been strong in my commitment to stamp out anti-Semitism, volunteering for the all-party anti-Semitism Committee and the terrible story of Auschwitz was already well known to me.

The flight was full of students with a smaller number of journalists and some MPs. As the flight took off, none of my colleagues seemed overexcited either - unsurprising, considering each stared bleakly at a variety of newspapers, pages and pages of which were filled with stories of allegations of political corruption. Putting my paper down, all I could think was that it was a bad day to leave the office; I confess, Auschwitz at that moment was not at the forefront of my mind.

Yet a few days days later, despite the continuing political crises and the pressure to catch up on work which should have been done before, hardly an hour passes that I do not find myself thinking about Auschwitz. From the iconic watch tower to the destroyed ovens, images flash past at random and I find I can hardly talk to anyone without telling them about what I saw, before urging them to visit. As Rabbi Marcus said to me, "hearing is not like seeing". 

It was when we walked into Auschwitz 1 through the gate with its infamous statement, Arbeit Macht Frei, that I realised how little I really knew about this place of cruelty and death; like everyone else, of course I knew of it, but I found I really knew little of any substance about it.

I hadn’t realised that there were three Auschwitz camps: Auschwitz 1 had been a Polish army barracks, converted into a concentration camp for political prisoners and Jews. In a space smaller than the Houses of Parliament, 20,000 people were confined. Beaten, marched huge distances to work and fed only meagre rations, they died in large numbers. It was at Auschwitz 1 that the Nazis began to experiment with different ways of murdering their victims. The first gas chamber was built in the camp and in September 1941, 850 malnourished and ill people were gassed for the first time. In some of the ‘barracks’ the conditions have been reproduced and it is difficult to describe the inhuman squalor in which they lived. In one small courtyard, movingly surrounded by candles and prayer cards, stood a small wall where prisoners were shot routinely for the smallest reasons.

As Auschwitz 1 was too small, in 1942 the Germans opened a purpose built camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz 2). I found it was the visit to this camp that made me understand the true horror of what had gone on. Purpose built to house at least 100,000 people at any one time, this camp for the first time had a number of gas chambers and crematoria, capable of disposing of thousands of people in a matter of days. For me, the saddest part of the visit was the moment we stopped on a path across the railway tracks and were told that this was where Dr Joseph Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death,’ divided the groups up. To the left, women with children, pregnant women, the old and the infirm: they were walked a couple of hundred yards to the gas chambers and crematoria. All the while the chimneys of the crematoria would have been belching out their foul-smelling smoke as they processed previous groups. As a father of four, standing alongside my wife Betsy, I froze at the thought of what a man watching his family ripped away from him must feel.

 On one occasion a mother refused to be parted from her son and as she screamed at the SS soldiers, Mengele drew his pistol and shot them both. Then, turning to the guards, he told them to round up the whole trainload - including those already selected for the work details - and ordered them all to be sent to the gas chambers, shouting, "away with this shit!" If I close my eyes, I can still see a picture, taken by an SS officer, of a mother and young children, part of a column walking away from the train, with the chimney in the background.

Even if selected for work details, the outcome was likely to be the same. So insanitary were the conditions that disease spread through the camp, killing thousands of weak and malnourished people. In long wooden huts originally designed for horses, people were crowded together in the triple level bunks. The weakest were left on the bottom - not a place to be as with so many suffering from dysentery and often unable to move, the lower bunks got covered in excrement. Too many in those terrible conditions just gave up and died.

Yet the cruelty could be in pure, uncaring neglect as well. We were told as we visited the processing centre for the work detail that when the naked inmates came out of the showers, they were given their clothes and wooden clogs. If they were given the wrong size clogs which they couldn’t wear, that was the equivalent of a death sentence: they would be lame within a couple of days and the lame were shipped off to the gas chambers. That is why when someone died in the camp, the fight that followed was over their shoes.

The figures speak for themselves. Approximately 1.3 million people died in Auschwitz. The majority died in the gas chambers, but many thousands died in the work details, sick and malnourished. Over 90% were Jews from all over Europe; the others included Romany Gypsies and political prisoners, some of whom were German.

Yet terrible as they are, it is not the figures alone that shocked me. Two further factors made the visit so memorable. First, the incredible scale of the camp and second, perhaps the most difficult to comprehend, was the sheer ruthless and functional efficiency of the grisly undertaking. There have been throughout history episodes of genocide, even to the present day as we have seen in Rwanda. Yet what came home to me, standing in the middle of the huge death camp, was how the Nazis had turned genocide into a cold and systematic factory process.

It was the little details that made me shudder as I walked around: the way they had extended the railway line into the camp so that they could speed up the new arrivals to the gas chambers; the building of gas chambers near the end of the track so that people didn’t have far to walk from the platform; the way they put two gas chambers and crematoria in the woods behind the camp so that the women and children would believe they were being moved to a more pleasant environment; finally, the way they recycled the ash from the crematorium to feed the fish ponds - fish the guards later ate.

Every detail was recorded in a fastidious way and from this we can see how the camp commandant searched for more efficient and cheaper ways to do his job. At one point I found myself staring into a huge display case, inside which was an enormous pile of hair; hair of all colours, some taken from young girls, still tied in plaits, and one even had the vestiges of a ribbon attached. This hair, we were told, was used to make ropes and mats for the army. The Sonderkommando, (inmates detailed to organise the victims into the gas chambers and responsible for the cremation), even pulled the gold out from the teeth of the corpses, before burning them. This was melted down and shipped back to Germany – nothing it seemed must be wasted. When the Jews arrived, their belongings, along with their clothes were taken to a warehouse, sorted and despatched back to the Fatherland; everything had to be used.

Auschwitz was deliberately turned into a factory. To understand how this was achieved one needs to look at the Commandant. According to Whitney Harris, the American prosecutor who interrogated him at the Nuremberg trials, Rudolf Höss appeared "normal", "like a grocery clerk". And former prisoners who encountered him at Auschwitz confirmed this view, adding that Höss always appeared calm and collected. He is the greatest mass murderer the world has ever seen, and yet there is no record of him ever personally hitting - let alone killing - anyone at the camp.

Höss lived with his wife and four children in a house just yards from the crematorium in Auschwitz main camp, where some of the earliest killing experiments were conducted using the poisonous insecticide Zyklon B. During his working days, Höss presided over the murder of more than a million people, but once he came home he lived the life of a solid, middle-class German husband and father. He even said to the prosecutors that he liked nothing more than to go back to his house and play with his little children in the evening after work.

As I walked around the camp reflecting on this cold bureaucratic place of death. I was struck by one final absurdity. With munitions and men needed to fight the war in the east, shipping millions of Jews into Auschwitz and the other death camps tied up soldiers, railway trucks and engines and messed up the rail network - which must have had a disastrous effect on Germany’s war effort. Even as late as January 1945, days before the Russians arrived, the killing continued.

At the end of the visit, we all met on the sight of one of the destroyed gas chambers and crematoria. As I listened to some readings from the students, I looked around. It was a beautiful spring evening with the trees in leaf, the sun was warm and around us birds sang. Here in the heart of Auschwitz, with such benign weather and standing on the epicentre of the killing machine, I found it hard to digest it all.

Then Rabbi Marcus started to chant a prayer in Hebrew, his melodic voice carrying in the spring air. The sadness of the music with its ancient cadences stirred me and I think I finally understood. That one voice represented one person, one person who was killed in this place, one person killed one million times. I had found it impossible to comprehend the death of a million people but I could see one person, their smile, their laugh, their hair, their clothes, and now their sound.

The sadness of Auschwitz is that those who planned and built their death factory could never see that.

Iain Duncan Smith MP: The case for John McCain

Former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith is MP for Chingford and Woodford Green and Chairman of the Centre for Social Justice.  In this Platform he makes the case for John McCain.  In recent weeks we have published Simon Burns MP in support of Hillary Clinton and Nick Bourne in support of Barack Obama.

It is not fashionable in Britain, amongst the metropolitan elite to do anything but extol the virtues of Barrack Obama and his message of change. There have been so many paeans of praise for Obama in the media, from pundits and politicians alike, that one would be forgiven for thinking that the US election is over and Senator Obama is the 44th President of the United States. Yet I think they all underestimate John McCain by assuming it is over bar the victory parade. This underdog knows how to fight.

McCain is a man who has great wells of courage and determination. I’m not sure how many people reading this know of his biography, ‘Faith of my Fathers,’ a remarkable book which unlike the usual self serving memoirs of most politicians is inspiring and enlightening. It tells of a man who has the courage and integrity to restore respect to the institution of the Presidency. Most know of the fact that he was tortured as a prisoner of war in Hanoi but what they don’t realise is that he had been offered a chance of early release because his father had taken over command of the Pacific fleet. He refused saying he would only be released when those who had been in captivity longer were let out. The North Vietnamese unable to get their propaganda coup beat him for a number of days so severely that he couldn’t stand. These beatings continued off and on for the next year and a half, yet he never took early release.

McCain is also someone who hasn’t been afraid to follow his own course, even if it offended his own party, if he thought it important. On the need for campaign finance reform he infuriated his party as he sided with others to try and improve a system he felt was open to abuse. Even on climate change, long before it became fashionable McCain was leading the way, warning of the problems the USA was storing up for itself and the rest of the planet by its reckless consumption. Whether you agree with his stance on global warming or not and I suspect many reading this may not, my point is that such independence of mind is seen in other successful leaders, I think of Churchill on the Nazi’s and Reagan on market economics, both who infuriated their parties elite but were proved right in the end.

Iain Duncan Smith MP: We beat the LibDems by being a decent party

Iain Duncan Smith is MP for Chingford and Woodford Green and Chairman of the Centre for Social Justice.

The question that raised its head in strategy discussions with every recent leader of the party and, I am sure, in David Cameron’s counsels, too, is: How do we deal with the Lib Dems?

That question is reinforced when, as I do, you go to Conservative marginal seats where the incumbent MP is a Lib-Dem. ‘Please,’ the candidate pleads, ‘Can you ask Central Office to do more to attack the Lib Dems?’ ‘We need to show everyone,’ they go on, ‘that they are two-faced… that they are on the left… that they say one thing to one audience and another to another… that they fight dirty… that they love the European Union and believe in high taxes.’

You can’t help having some sympathy for this request, after all it is the Lib-Dems’ improved political position which over the last fifteen or so years has done such significant damage to the Conservative Party. Not just in seats lost to Lib-Dems but where they have eaten away at our vote, opening the door to Labour.

Sympathetic as I might be, I am however certain that this head-to-head national battle just doesn’t work. The more I have watched the Conservatives attack, the more I notice that the public doesn’t seem to pay any attention to the content of our critique.  Instead we seem to confirm many of the voters’ negative views of us. I believe that the rules of politics which apply to us don’t apply to the Lib-Dems.

Iain Duncan Smith MP: The road to social justice is a generational undertaking

Iain Duncan Smith MP presents the conclusions of his social justice policy group later today.  Here he sets out the 'big picture ideas' at the heart of the 'Breakthrough Britain' report.

There has been a great deal of coverage in the media about the detail of my social justice policy group’s report and I’m grateful to ConservativeHome for covering some of our recommendations over recent days.  Throughout the work on this report I have been determined to follow the evidence. There have been no prejudgments and no attempt to limit recommendations to what might be deemed politically acceptable.  We have taken three thousand hours of evidence from over two thousand groups.  We have emphasised contact with people and groups who have a deep understanding of the problems associated with this breakdown. We have also visited inner city communities across the UK and in a number of other countries.

Beyond the individual policy ideas I thought ConservativeHome readers might be interested in a few big picture observations.

First of all there is the basic truth that Britain is currently losing the fight against poverty.  Despite Britain’s huge tragic combinations of family breakdown, addiction and educational failure mean that many people are leading lives without hope and many communities are as broken today as they have ever been.  The cost in human misery is enormous.  The cost to taxpayers is extraordinary, too.  Britain spends £104bn on the NHS every year.  We estimate the cost of social breakdown at nearly as much; £102bn.

This leads me to my second observation. I have committed the last few years of my political life to this project because I am a one nation Conservative.  I am offended by the divisions and poverty of 21st century Britain but I also know that we will not be spending taxpayers’ money wisely until we get on top of this problem.  Social breakdown is the leading cause of the growth in the size of the state.  Money that is currently being spent picking up the pieces of broken Britain could be aiding the very sick or the very disabled.  It could be invested in our schools or transport infrastructure. It could even be given back to hard-pressed taxpayers.   

Iain Duncan Smith: Israel is one of the most vulnerable nations on the planet

Iain Duncan Smith MP reflects on the current crisis in the Middle East.

Recent surveys have shown little public support within Britain for Israel’s actions against the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.  Israel’s leaders protest that they have a right to self-defence but these protests win little sympathy.  Most observers, including some leading members of my own party, believe that Israel has acted “disproportionately”.  The nature of the media coverage has encouraged this belief.  BBC and other reporters broadcast the horrific scenes of civilian areas flattened by Israeli bombs.  Hardly any attention is given to the fact that Hezbollah launch their missiles from residential areas. Hezbollah think nothing of using family homes and flats as human shields. When Saddam Hussain did that we were appalled.  But not now.

I have always supported Israel because I admire its democracy and the constitutional freedoms enjoyed by its citizens.  Many of the nations in the region fund terrorists and repress their own people.  All of the world’s democracies should have a natural solidarity with Israel but there has been little sign of such solidarity in recent days or in recent years.

Israel has failed to win the support it deserves because the rights and wrongs of situations do not matter enough in our postmodern societies.  What weighs most heavily on today’s western minds are perceptions of strength.  Israel is seen as the strong man of the region.  It has the advanced weaponry, the elite troops and the support of America.  The Palestinians first and now the Hezbollah operatives are seen as the underdogs.  It’s plucky Hezbollah versus mighty Israel on the media.  People feel ‘disproportionate’ sympathy with the people of the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon because there is a clear imbalance between their crude forms of organisation and weaponry and of that available to Israel.

If Israel is ever to win more international allies the western understanding of the region needs to be reframed.  The reality is that Israel is one of the most vulnerable nations on the planet.  It is certainly the most besieged.  It is surrounded by fundamentalist preachers, terrorists and dictators who object to its very existence.  This true axis of evil is led by the President of Iran.  When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently called for a war against the West, and for Israel “to be wiped off the face of the map”, one of the biggest mistakes made was to (i) treat this as something new and (ii) to dismiss it as political rhetoric.  Far from being a one-off statement, Ahmadinejad was confirming a series of statements by Iranian leaders. In 2001 Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani stated “if a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the application of an atomic bomb, it would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world”.  Iran, in particular, and Syria are now the world’s leading funders of terrorism.  Both Hamas and Hezbollah are nurtured from Tehran.  How would we feel if nearby nations were funding Britain-hating terrorists?  What would we think of our political leaders if they waited six years to respond to missile attacks from those terrorists?

The ‘world community’ asks Israel to act proportionately but what will ‘world community leaders’ do in order to protect Israel if it does act in a way that Annan, Chirac and Putin think appropriate?  Not, of course, that these leaders act proportionately in defence of their own interests.  Putin almost bombed Grozny back to the stone age when Chechnya wanted independence.  Chirac ignored world opinion when France tested nuclear weapons in the South Pacific.  Annan turned a blind eye to the corruption of the oil-for-food programme – corruption that contributed to the loss of thousands of lives every month in Saddam’s Iraq.  The best clue to understanding how the world will protect Israel in the next few years is to reflect on recent history.  The best thing the world community does is talk. Disproportionate talking is in fact the only thing it does but jaw-jaw has not stopped the suicide bomb or missile attacks on Israel.  After Israel unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon in accordance with UN resolutions the world community promised to disband Hezbollah and protect the northern territories of Israel from shelling.  It didn’t.  The promise never evolved into action.  $100m has been sunk into the UN’s interim force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in every year of the last six but Hezbollah has only grown stronger.  The only newsworthy story generated by UNIFIL was a recent financial scam.

Israel played by the international rules for six years but ‘disproportionate diplomacy’ did nothing to stop attacks on civilians or its soldiers being kidnapped.  Israel now watches the same international community engage in a ‘disproportionate dither’ over Iran’s nuclear programme.  Tel Aviv has seen the world fail to protect Israel from Hezbollah.  Why should it have much hope that we will protect it from a nuclear Tehran?

Ultimately the terrorists of Hezbollah and their backers are responsible for the loss of life in Israel and across Lebanon.  If peace is to be found for all people of the region it needs to begin with a fundamental reappraisal of recent years of international diplomacy.  From Bosnia to Darfur and from Iraq to Lebanon the UN has chalked up a terrible record of failure.  After this immediate crisis has passed it is vital that we first face up to the reasons for that record of failure.