Above the gates of Auschwitz the phrase “Arbeits macht frei” is prominently displayed. It means
“work makes you free”, sometimes translated as “Work sets you free”. It was the camp’s
commandant, Rudolf Höß, who put the phrase above Auschwitz’s gates, and Primo Levi,
one of the Holocaust survivors, famously said in 1959 that the phrase was chosen because of
its irony. He said that the Nazis believed that work was humiliating, and an act of suffering
for them. That’s why the National Socialists thought it was more suitable for the enemies
of the Reich - in this case, the Jews. Thus, the Jews were worked to death under the slogan ‘work
makes you free’ as some sort of cruel irony. And that’s definitely how the survivors saw it;
they thought that’s why the Nazis put that phrase there. But is this really the case?
Was that the reason the National Socialists used that phrase? Or
was there another explanation? Well, to put it bluntly, no,
that’s not why they put that phrase there. And to understand why, let’s go back to 1933.
Hitler gets into power in the January of 1933, and in the May of that year, he creates the DAF - the
Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or German Labour Front. This was the official trade union of the Third
Reich; no other trade union could exist, only the DAF. It had a whopping 32 million members
in 1938 - making this one of the biggest trade unions in history. Although, Robert Gellately in
the book “Hitler’s True Believers” says that the DAF only had 22 million members in 1939,
but that might be because workers were being taken from the factories and put
in the military as the war approached. Regardless,
the DAF had a lot of people in it, and if it was 32 million, then that’s 42% of the
German population. So most of the workers in the Third Reich were in this organisation.
The DAF consolidated all the blue and white collar workers into one organisation,
and it’s leader, Robert Ley, wanted a trade union (a syndicate) like the DAF,
thinking that the DAF should serve “the greatness of the Volksgemeinschaft”
(Volksgemeinschaft meaning: the people’s community). He also said:
“We know that employers are no angels…”
And Robert Gellately explains:
“The DAF would temper the lust for profit
and transform workers into the “master race” (Herrenmenschen).”
Time to go into a bit of ideology here. The Nazis believed that there was a Law
of Struggle (Kampfgesetz), and that there was no life without struggle. Now, there’s so many
layers to this idea of Struggle; it has religious meaning, and its origins go back to a pre-Socratic
Greek philosopher called Heraclitus. And I’ve been over this in a lot of detail in my video
“From Plato to Hitler: The Ideological Origins of National Socialism”, so check that out if
you want the full history of this (which I do recommend you get, and I’ll link it at the end).
For this video, I’m just going to skip to the point, which is that: for National Socialists,
man could become God if men were ‘awoken’ to God through Struggle (Gnosticism). One of the various
meanings of Struggle was the word “work”. Work was seen as a part of this struggle to get to God;
partly because you’re doing work for God, but also because you’re working towards God, and
you’re becoming God itself - you’re transcending the material realm through work. So they said:
“Arbeit macht frei” - ‘work will set you free’ as a nice catch phrase for this. (I
know it was the title of a fiction book, we’ll get to that, but this was the deeper meaning.)
As I said, they famously displayed this slogan at the entrance of Auschwitz,
but it was actually first displayed at Dachau in the early 1930s. In 1933, Communists,
conservatives, and others were thrown into Dachau with the intention that the prisoners would learn,
through hard work, to become members of the Volksgemeinschaft (the people’s community).
“We had to rescue these people,
to bring them back to the German national community. We had to re-educate them.”
“...Himmler met Hitler again on May 7th [1933] and showed him a letter from a former Dachau prisoner,
gushing with praise for how his stay in the camp had turned his life around and how he had become a
“family father”. This was the kind of rationale that matched both Himmler and Hitler’s notion
of how “re-education” in the camps could rescue people for the Volksgemeinschaft.”
One of the leaders at Dachau, and later the commandant of Auschwitz, said:
“I have written exhaustively on the subject of work, because I have myself had such ample
opportunity of appreciating its psychological value, and because I wished to show the
beneficial effect it always has on a prisoner’s mind, as I know from firsthand experience.”
Now, even though somewhere in the region of 100,000 people went through the ‘official’ camp
system in 1933, there were unofficial camps too with another 100,000 people in them. You’d think
that they’d all be killed off - afterall, that’s what everyone on the internet says:
as soon as the Nazis got into power, they arrested the Communists and killed them all.
Well, the real death toll during the first year of Nazi rule was probably around
600. That’s right, 600. The vast majority were communists, and the vast majority
were not killed. There were nearly 5 million Communists in Germany, and only 600-ish were
killed in that first year when Hitler supposedly “crushed the trade unions” (which he didn’t,
he nationalised them). By July 1934, there were only 4,700 people in all the camps in Germany;
the rest had been set free by this point. And Hitler announced an amnesty on the 7th
of August 1934, which cut the number down to just 2,400. Most of the people being set free
from the camps simply converted away from Communism and became National Socialists.
“[Hitler] rejected from the outset the idea that the millions who voted for the
KPD or the SPD could simply be “forbidden” [from the people’s community], and he was
fully aware that the process of getting them integrated in the community could take years.”
By the way, Gellately is fast becoming one of my favourite historians, and his
book “Hitler’s True Believers” (published last year, in 2022) should be a wakeup call for all
those historians still propagating the old narratives, such as Laurence Rees who says
that the Nazis were lying when they said they were “re-educating” the “misguided” Germans.
No, they actually did use these camps to convert people to Nazism. “Work would set
them free.” Obviously, that didn’t apply to the Jews who were sent to the camps later (we’ll
get to that in a second), but it did apply to the Germans in the camps; they were converted.
So, to a German, work would set them free. Struggle would bring them to God. It would
purify the blood (the spirit) of the nation. They’re “working towards the Führer” because
he’s the prophet of God. But Hitler says in Mein Kampf that, not only did the Nazi Flag
embody work and ‘Struggle’, but that work was inherently anti-Semitic. And this goes back
to the idea he states earlier in the book that the Germans work for the community - the people,
the Volk - while the Jews, he says, only work for themselves. He basically says that
the Jews stole their money and achievements off of other people, which is why, he says,
they’ve never had a civilization of their own (this was before Israel was created in 1948),
and he says the Jews can only exist by living off other nations, like a disease.
“The culture which the Jew enjoys to-day is the product of the work of others and
this product is debased in the hands of the Jew.”
“The most important thing is inventing, and the second most valuable activity is
producing the article, and the easiest thing is then selling what has been made, and that
is the work of the Jew. The reason why today he has no culture of his own, no state of his own,
has to do with the fact that for thousands of years he has avoided any productive work.
He has not been persecuted because he did not perform productive work, but because
he demanded unproductive interest charges. He always only bought, sold and sold again, and our
ancestors forbade that: "You do not work our soil, therefore you have no right to buy it either".”
So, for a Nazi, the phrase ‘work makes you free’ means something different when applied
to the Germans, than it does to the Jews. For the Germans, you work for your community,
so work will purify your soul and get you closer to God. For the Jews, the Nazis think they don’t
really work, that they only exist by stealing off other people, and that they are devils. Thus,
because work is a purification process, the bad ‘devil’ blood - the Jews - would be purged through
the Struggle of work. So ‘work makes you free’ removes the Jews from society, and purifies the
German blood and spirit. It purifies and unites the Volksgemeinschaft - the people’s community.
“... the official Nazi ideology really believed that work is liberating, in the
sense that it integrates you with the Vaterland, the country where you are living. It was the only
way that a citizen who is not a warrior could contribute to the strength of the country.”
Now, I’ve not read every single book on the Holocaust (there’s that many, it’s literally
impossible), so maybe this is explained somewhere. However, I haven’t seen a proper explanation of
it, and I doubt it because many historians are coming at this from the Jewish perspective,
which makes perfect sense, but that means they’ve neglected the Nazi perspective. They’re not done
sufficient work on the Nazi ideology and philosophy, which is why, when I read about
this slogan online or in the books that I do have, they all say the same sort of thing.
For example, this website explains that the origin “dates as far back
as to [the] times of [Gnostic] John”... the one who wrote the Book of Gnosticism.
(If you haven’t seen my old video on the philosophy of National Socialism
you may not get the reference…) Anyway, John wrote “The truth makes you free”.
“However, the first man to paraphrase those words was German philologist Lorenz Diefenbach.
In 1873 he wrote the novel called Arbeit macht frei [Work sets you free]. It was
a beautiful story about finding a path to virtue through labor.”
Like, what did we say before? Work as struggle will purify you and get you
closer to God. So this is the same sort of thing.
“Before the war, Germans were using the slogan in fighting against mass unemployment. They wanted
to increase [the] nation’s efficiency and general economic situation. However, as [the] Nazis came
to power, Arbeit macht Frei appeared [and] became a motto of their false and brutal ideology.”
Fair enough, but it doesn’t explain why. Wikipedia says that SS officer Theodor Eicke
chose the phrase for use at Dachau, but again, doesn’t explain why, and neither does its source.
According to Rudolf Höß’s autobiography,
he says this about the German prisoners in the early years of the camps:
“It was Eicke’s firm intention that no matter what category, those prisoners whose steady
and zealous work marked them out from the others should in due course be released,
regardless of what the Gestapo and the Criminal Police Office might think to the contrary. Indeed
this occasionally happened, until the war put an end to all such good intentions.”
Inspired by Eicke, Rudolf Höß later put the phrase above Auschwitz’s gates. And we’ve got to remember
that the camps weren’t just killing centres, but also work-camps as well. Auschwitz was a vast
enterprise, with an IG Farben factory and other workshops. There wasn’t just Jews at the camp,
but other “races” as well, and not all of these were destined to be murdered. Some were just
there to work (admittingly in bad conditions). That’s why there were several camps (including
Auschwitz) where the SS set up brothels for the hard working non-Jewish prisoners. Himmler
genuinely believed that these facilities would increase productivity, as it offered
an incentive for these men to work harder, since many of them had been in these camps for years.
So, from the National Socialist perspective, they genuinely wanted to convert the Germans
to National Socialism, and used the camps as a means to instil a work-ethic in the non-believers,
which (because of their ideology) they thought would reintegrate those people into the German
community. As Hitler said in Mein Kampf, they believed that the Volksgemeinschaft was created
by work, hence why it’s called the National Socialist German WORKERS’ Party. This is a
worker movement - a labour movement - because the idea of ‘work’ is at the heart of the ideology.
But that’s for Germans. For the Jews, ‘Arbeits macht frei’ means something else. The National
Socialist German Workers’ believed that the Jews were “work-shy”. Hitler believed that
the Jews only got their money from stealing it off other people, not by working. Thus,
they believed that the Jews were not fit for work, which is why, when they forced the Jews to work,
this ‘work’ (or, rather, they) killed them. Work, or the German workers, were killing
the Jews. ‘Work sets the Germans free, but work kills the Jews.’ (It’s Aufheben - to transcend
and abolish at the same time.) So, while it does mean that they were going to be worked to death,
it is really the opposite of how Primo Levi and many of the survivors interpreted it.
It does make sense why the survivors would come to the conclusion that they did;
it’s the most logical conclusion from an outsider’s point of view. However,
the historians should have asked: “But is this really the case?” and then actually looked into
the National Socialist ideology to find out the truth. They didn’t do that because they were too
busy pretending that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was actually the National German
Party. They were too busy taking the 25 Points of the Nazi Party Program, selecting the first 4,
and then dismissing the other 21 as irrelevant. And yes, a German historian who was definitely
dialectic in his thinking and who talked a lot about “transcendance” did just that in
1964 to paint the Nazis as reactionaries or the “resistance to transcendence”.
We are not going to get an accurate history of the Holocaust until historians stop
denying what the National SOCIALIST German WORKERS’ Party actually was. You know,
the clue is on the gates of Auschwitz. So, if you want to know what National Socialism actually was,
you can start by looking at my videos on National Socialist ideology, philosophy and economy. I’ll
leave playlists in the description for you to check out. Thanks for watching, bye for now.