Censorship in Auschwitz
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Censorship in Auschwitz concentration camp (German: Konzentrationslager Auschwitz; also K.L. Auschwitz) followed the broader pattern of political and cultural suppression in the Third Reich. General censorship in camp occurred in a variety of daily life topics and was more stringent than the outside world. The main focus was monitoring prisoners’ written correspondences, which was under strict censorship by the SS garrison on camp. Starting from 1939, the Mail Censorship Office (German: Postzensurstelle) which was directly subordinated to the commandant's office (German: Abteilung I) took the main responsibility for checking the contents of letters and parcels as well as receiving and sending correspondences. The SS personnel would cut or blacken suspicious content that was considered inappropriate i.e. any information regarded the true living condition of the concentration camp or prisoner's health status. Even worse, some prisoner's letters were never sent out to their family members.
Only a small number of German and Polish prisoners were allowed to write and send correspondences. Selected prisoners were required to write in German, the official language of the Third Reich. In order to be successfully mailed, letters had to be written in 15 lines on standard stationery, signed with the sender's name and the belonged camp's name, and stamped at the upper right for general circulation. All letters need to contain the opening phrase “I am healthy and feel well” (German: “Ich bin gesund und fühle mich gut”), though it usually did not reflect the actual physical status of prisoners. The SS garrison in Auschwitz launched “Letter Operation” (German: Briefaktion) in March 1944. Jewish prisoners from the Theresienstadt ghetto in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and Berlin were forced to write and send postcards to their families and friends. These unregistered prisoners were later liquidated in the gas chambers, while their relatives who received postcards were closely monitored by the Nazis. Despite that, prisoners had developed a set of approaches to evade being censored based on the camp ecology, such as writing in codes. The underground intelligence network in the vicinity of the camp further expanded secret correspondences to enable prisoners and their families to keep in touch, share information, and obtain resources for survival.
The censorship system ended in the camp with the collapse of the Third Reich and the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945. In the postwar period, some of the Holocaust survivors and victims’ families donated the censored correspondences they received to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.