Nazi Gas Chambers: From Memory to History

A Visiting Fellow to the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex, Robert Priseman is a painter, curator and writer whose projects include No Human Way to Kill, SUMAC, The Francis Bacon Interiors and Fame. In 'Nazi Gas Chambers: From Memory to History' he presents a series of beautifully detailed drawings of Nazi Gas Chambers from the outside and contrasts those with stark paintings of the interiors.Expanded on by thoughtful and insightful essays by Professor Peter Vergo and Professor Rainer Schulze this project seeks to explore how on the 20th January, 2012, sixteen men could have sat around a table and made the decision to kill eleven million European Jews by lethal gas.Genocides are not unusual in human history and have occurred around the world many times since the Second World War. The Holocaust is however unique amongst all these mass killings because it is the only time in history where industrial processes have been applied by a culturally advanced people to the taking of human life. We don't like to think of ourselves as possessing this capacity and perhaps that is where denial takes its role. Denial can of course be used as a coping mechanism. By ignoring or disbelieving powerful events which have the potential to emotionally overwhelm us, we enable our everyday lives to continue, we gain the capacity to 'carry on as normal'. The gas chambers of Auschwitz, Sobibor, Majdanek and the many other locations of Nazi mass killing did not just appear overnight, someone somewhere received an order to tile the gas chamber, someone was contracted to make and fit the pipes, supply the bricks make the metal doors and their hinges. All these people and many more will have received money for their work and not thought of themselves as directly responsible for the atrocity of the Holocaust, because they did not carry out the actual killing or come up with the original policy. They were in fact just getting on with their lives.