Narrative Laundry

From Melno Park to Theresienstadt. Propaganda is aimed not only at communicating a message, but at constructing reality itself.

When Meta’s Facebook, based in Melno Park, California, announced on the 7^th of January 2025 that it would end its third-party fact-checking program and move to a so-called “community-notes model” it went on to clarify that the company had no immediate plans to end fact-checking in the EU and would review its EU content moderation obligations before making changes.

This small footnote may turn out to be more significant than one might at first think. If the EU really does end up defending its commitment to protecting and promoting the importance of free speech built upon the foundation of verifiable facts [i] then this line in the sand may turn out to be significant for the health of our democracies.[ii]

Pedanteria – The Laundry

In the early Spring of 2023 I was taken for a walk around the centre of Bielsko-Biała, a city in southern Poland, by historian Kuba Krajewski. As we walked down a cobbled street he told me, “for Bielsko-Biała the process of information manipulation has a resonance and legacy of a very particular nature. Here, in the centre of the city is a building complex and courtyard, Pedanteria”. We walked through an arch and into a typical urban 19^th century Polish courtyard. “This was the laundry that used to clean the clothes of those enslaved at Oświęcim, at Auschwitz-Birkenau – which is only 38 kilometres from here”.

Pedanteria - Bielsko-Biała: Photo Chris Baldwin

As we walked we discussed a renovation plan for Pedanteria and later that day he sent me copies of documents held at the archive at Auschwitz-Birkenau. With the help of Google translate I have translated the documents from Polish to English. They are worth quoting (and reading) in full:

Testimony of Jakub Marek written on 8 September 1968, Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, group: Statements, vol. 61, pp. 225–227 (contains 2 typewritten pages); "Auschwitz – on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp"…As far as I remember, the Auschwitz prisoners first came to our laundry in February 1941. It was a terrible – I would say – macabre sight. Emaciated human wrecks, – walking skeletons, barely able to stand. Loaded with bundles of camp filth, they carried them to the warehouse. Behind each of them, like a shadow, walked an SS guard, with a machine gun ready to shoot, aimed at his "ward". Each of these Nazi torturers shouted at the prisoner in his own way, calling on him inhumanly to hurry: "Schneller! Schneller!" /Hurry! Hurry!/. The slightest sluggishness, only apparent, because the exhaustion only allowed the prisoners to barely walk, caused the SS men to react by kicking them wherever they could, as high as their feet, shod in heavy boots, could reach.

State Archives in Katowice, Bielsko-Biała Branch, Schutzpolizei Bielitz, file no. 1. 4:

When Schweizer signed an agreement with the Auschwitz camp to wash underwear, the laundry received modern washing machines and boilers under war priority and began operating on a larger scale in the winter of 1941. Usually, underwear and prisoner clothes as well as bedding and dirty laundry of the SS crew were washed for KL Auschwitz. Due to the lack of a drying room, the underwear was dried in the yard. The laundry worked in three shifts. The prisoners’ underwear – long johns and shirts, were often spattered with blood, covered with feces and soaked with urine and colonies of lice and worms. In late autumn 1941, for 3-4 weeks, bloody drill uniforms of Soviet soldiers were brought to the laundry. They were stored in the dirty underwear warehouse under the flat of the tenant Wawrzyczek near the boiler room. Over 30 thousand uniforms. In some of the uniforms, soldiers’ identity cards were found. Rolled up and placed in small dark containers, they were found in the pockets of blouses or sewn under the collars, or in the lower pleats of the blouse. At first, the identification cards found by the workers were collected and stored in the yard near the boiler room. Then the search of the uniforms was entrusted to trusted workers of German nationality. The greatest increase in laundry services took place in 1943 and mid-1944, because the weekly throughput was then around 8–10 thousand sets, and transports took place four times a week, with two different working groups of prisoners taking part in them.

Along with these fragmentary accounts of the link between Bielsko-Biała’s Pedanteria and Auschwitz-Birkenau there exists a series of grainy, out-of-focus photographs taken clandestinely by a passers-by or neighbour at great personal risk one might imagine. The photographs show SS officers standing in the courtyard with other figures, maybe prisoners, in the foreground. As far as documentary evidence goes, the closest we can call ‘facts’, there is nothing remarkable and morally condemning about these shots even if they do seem to confirm the presence of Nazi soldiers in the courtyard in which I stood. But the texts quoted above, protected and preserved at Auschwitz-Birkenau archive and the State Archives in Katowice, are of a different order. They exist. They have been acknowledged by historians and document experts as genuine and bone fide. We can trust their authenticity and thus begin build meaning, understanding and judgement upon them.

In 1995 I saw Clause Lanzmann’s documentary film, “A Visitor from the Living”. Since then I have been aware of the story of Maurice Rossel. In war time German-occupied Czechoslovakia the Theresienstadt ghetto was used as a ‘waystation’ for concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. In June 1944 the International Red Cross made a visit to Theresienstadt to assess both the conditions and purpose of the camp. The SS had prepared a meticulous and utterly bogus display for them. As a result, on the 23^rd June 1944 36 photographs were taken by International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegate Maurice Rossel during his visit to camp. The SS “beatification” of the camp and ensuing photographs erroneously ‘documented’ the conditions Jewish inmates, contributed to a conclusion by Red Cross inspectors that inmates were not being ‘transported onwards’, and helped undermine other more accurate accounts of the real purpose of the camp.[iii] This ‘embellishment’ activity continued with the shooting of a SS propaganda film in Terezín/Theresienstadt only a few weeks after the visit by the representatives of Denmark and the International Red Cross. During August and September 1944 Nazi filmmakers made the film whose title was probably going to be ‘Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet’. Since it was not finished until the last weeks of the war, it was never shown to a wider public.[iv] The Nazis became experts in the abuse of both still and moving images to communicate their political ideology and undermine that of their enemies. They were precise curators of an illusion of fact, or what we might call, a ‘narrative laundry’.

The process of weaponisation of information continues as I write. According to Rappler’s CEO Maria Ressa, in January 2023 Meta started to 'choke' traffic to news sites. In the crucial year of 2024, 74 countries (a little more than half of the world) voted in elections, users actually received less facts in their newsfeeds on Facebook. On the 7^thJanuary 2025 Facebook announced its decision to remove the very minimal layer of fact-checking safety which had existed over the last few years. Mark Zukerberg declared this as a move against "censorship". But was it not a move against safety and democracy?

Nobel prize winner Maria Ressa is clear. We now have a platform for 3.2 BILLION people around the planet for whom profit is more important than safety. And that is the problem with social media - it's not social as the users cannot control it, and it's not media because it does not abide to media regulations[v]. With Big Tech there is no technology released today literally anchored in facts. As Ressa says, “Generative AI, released in November 2022, is not anchored in facts - indeed, not being anchored in facts is a feature of its design”.