HITLER'S BROTHEL BY STEVE MATTHEWS. FACT-CHECKING REVIEW.
Originally from the UK (and having lived in Australia for more than three decades), the nearly seventy-year-old experienced author assures in the book that, as part of his extensive research, he has read tens of thousands of pages and hundreds of hours of documentary material on the Holocaust, made two visits to Poland, during which he visited the site of the former Auschwitz camp, and even had the opportunity to speak to several people who experienced the war. The research is to culminate in a fact-inspired story "about an aspect of the camp system that only a few knew existed", revealing "one of the darkest secrets of the Second World War" (as it reads in the From the Author section and on the back cover). This dark secret is, according to Matthews, the existence of the puff or camp brothel. However, he probably did not know that Tadeusz Borowski, a former Auschwitz prisoner, had already written about this kind of institution in 1946 (in his short story U nas w Auschwitzu). The book We Were in Auschwitz, in which Borowski's text appeared, was then published in Munich with an edition of 10,000 copies. Former female prisoners, among others, Seweryna Szmaglewska in her memoirs Dymy nad Birkenau, first published in 1945 (the book was also translated into English), and Zofia Kossak in her book Z otchłani (From the Abyss), which appeared in print in 1946, also wrote about the existence of the camp puff. On the other hand, since the end of the last century, many scientific studies have been published on the subject (for example: Christa Schikorra, Prostitution weiblicher Häftlinge als Zwangsarbeit; or Robert Sommer, Die Häftlingsbordelle im KZ-Komplex Auschwitz-Birkenau).
In claiming, therefore, that the existence of the camp puff was a secret kept for years, Matthews is, in effect, either exposing his ignorance and lack of a deeper understanding of classic camp literature or seeking to sensationalise it to attract the reader's attention. Indeed, it is significant that the book - published in 2020 in Australia and therefore intended for a reader unfamiliar with the symbolism of Auschwitz - bears the scandalous title: Hitler's Brothel.
By asserting that he has done extensive research on the subject, the author suggests he has some expertise and a broader-than-average competence to speak on historical issues. In reality, however, Matthews' book did not only fail to provide any revealing findings about the history of Auschwitz or anything new about the existence of the camp's brothel, but in both areas, failed to provide anything at all that was consistent with, or at least close to, the historical truth. The novel is a fabrication from beginning to end, based solely on the author's imagination, stereotypes and even prejudices. It contains so much historical rubbish, so obvious even to the layman that it is difficult to understand why the Polish publisher included information on the cover suggesting that the events it describes are true. The historical realities of the Second World War, the Holocaust and Auschwitz itself, painted in the book and intended as a backdrop to the narrative, reveal the author's complete lack of knowledge in all possible areas: geographically, geopolitically, chronologically and finally, about the social and psychological realities of Polish society under occupation.
The action of the novel covers the period from January 1940. The reader learns at the outset that the Auschwitz death camp (set up six months later as a concentration camp for Poles) was already operating nearby Cracow, with transports of thousands of doomed Hungarian Jews being transported to it every day. The reader also gets to learn the entirely fictionalised history of the camp (or rather sub-camp) in Wiśnica, whose commandant is Baldric Fischer - a demoralised, sexually promiscuous and self-loathing careerist with a repulsive appearance. Driven by ambition, he wants to surpass the murderous results of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, so he constantly thinks of ways to make the prisoners under his command work faster, increase the efficiency of the gas chambers and crematoria in Wiśnica, and take over the transports sent to Auschwitz, thus proving Höss's incompetence and gaining applause at the highest levels of the Third Reich.
It must be strongly emphasised that neither the camp in Wiśnica, Baldric Fischer, nor other characters featured in the book (except the episodic appearances of Rudolf Höss, Josef Mengele, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann and Adolf Hitler) ever existed. None of the events described in the book ever occurred or have been misrepresented entirely.
The author's intention was to describe a fictional camp, which would focus on the most dramatic events and commonly known images and symbols taken from the history of German concentration camps. In a note From the author, he admits: "While the Wiśnica camp itself did not exist, many of the events and facilities I describe took place and were located in German concentration camps in the European territory." The very idea of treating history as such shows that the author does not truly understand the dynamics of the development of concentration camps and does not perceive the difference between camps established before the outbreak of the Second World War on German territory and those created much later on the territory of occupied Poland. Consequently, he also fails to understand the uniqueness of the history of Auschwitz and its role in the German system of exterminating not only Jews but also Poles and representatives of other nationalities. If one wants to write credibly about the history of the Holocaust, it is necessary to remember that it was a multi-stage, staggered and time-varying process and not a phenomenon that happened overnight. In January 1940, the gas chambers were not in existence yet, and no one at the time even imagined the direction the plan for the "final solution to the Jewish question" would take.
If one were to rely solely on the information on the cover and in the afterword, one might think that Steve Matthews' book Hitler's Brothel (2020, Big Sky Publishing) would have the potential to become one of the crucial voices in the discussion on the moral condition of an individual in an extreme situation.