Frühe Bestrebungen zu einer 'Katholisierung' des ehemaligen NS-Lagers Auschwitz

Abstract

The present article looks at attempts to claim the memory of the Nazi camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau for Catholics and ethnic Poles, as expressed in Poland's most renowned Catholic press organ, Cracow's Tygodnik Powszechny (Popular Weekly), between 1948 and 1957/58. The discourse of the early post-war years already reflected patterns of argumentation which were to reappear in the 1980s and 1990s during discussions about the historical and moral legitimacy of Christian Symbols at the site of the camp. The article first traces the three-year debate (1948-1950) on whether to honour several million victims by erecting an equal number of crosses at the camp site. It then deals with how Tygodnik Powszechny - despite politically mandated disruptions of the early postwar years of the newspaper - reported on the attitudes and behaviour of Polish Catholics in the face of the Nazi judeocide. The discourse focused on how human kind's experience of the inconceivable National Socialist mass murder could be put into a concrete, comprehensible form. The peculiarity of the suggestions, however, shows that it was not possible to separate these ideas from prevailing attitudes towards the Nazi camp. Polish society was centred on its own suffering and wiped the Jewish victims from its memory (and memorial rituals). Consequently, when reflecting on a symbolic (re)shaping of the camp, it lay Catholic/Polish Claims on Auschwitz. Beyond all this, had already gained a reputation of being a major instrument of anti-Polish repression during the years of occupation. The Polish side failed to recognize its role as one of the centres of the Nazi judeocide, although nine tenths of the victims of Auschwitz died because the National Socialists defined them as Jews, and thus as enemies. In this distorted view, taboos prevalent in Polish society since the war also played a role. These taboos deeper origins lay in the strained relations between the Polish majority and the Jewish minority which were never subject to reappraisal.