Arbeit Macht Frei - Use By The Nazis

Use By The Nazis

The slogan "Arbeit macht frei" was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. The slogan's use in this instance was ordered by SS General Theodor Eicke, inspector of concentration camps and second commandant of Dachau Concentration Camp.

The slogan can still be seen at several sites, including over the entrance to Auschwitz I where, according to BBC historian Laurence Rees in his "Auschwitz: a New History", the sign was erected by order of commandant Rudolf Höss. This particular sign was made by prisoner-labourers including Jan Liwacz, and the upper bowl in the B of the word ARBEIT is wider than the lower bowl—thus making the letter seem upside-down. The "flipped" B has fueled ongoing rumors that the apparent error was done on purpose as a signal to new arrivals about what was actually happening behind the facility's gates, but this style was seen elsewhere in the era.

The slogan – first used over the gate of a "wild camp" in the city of Oranienburg, which was set up in an abandoned brewery in March 1933 during the time that the first political prisoners were being held for an indefinite period without charges in a number of places in Germany, and rebuilt in 1936 as Sachsenhausen – can also be seen at the Dachau concentration camp, Gross-Rosen concentration camp, and the Theresienstadt Ghetto-Camp, as well as at Fort Breendonk in Belgium. It has been claimed that the slogan was placed over entrance gates to Auschwitz III / Buna/Monowitz as well as Flossenbürg. Primo Levi describes seeing the words illuminated over a doorway (as distinct from a gate) in Auschwitz III/Buna Monowitz.

At Buchenwald, "Jedem das Seine" (literally, "to each his own", but idiomatically "everyone gets what he deserves") was used.

In 1938 the Austrian political cabaret writer Jura Soyfer and the composer Herbert Zipper, while prisoners at Dachau Concentration Camp, wrote the Dachaulied (The Dachau Song). They had spent weeks marching in and out of the camp's gate to daily forced labour, and considered the motto "Arbeit macht frei" over the gate an insult. The song repeats the phrase cynically as a "lesson" taught by Dachau. (The first verse is translated in the article on Jura Soyfer.)

In The Kingdom of Auschwitz, Otto Friedrich wrote regarding Höss:

He seems not to have intended it as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labour does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom.