Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps 1938-1945

Rating:
Summary: An important chronicle, a serious historical contribution.
Review: Herman Langbein is one of the best known Auschwitz historians, and this book chronicles, in painstaking detail, acts of resistance and defiance that took place in the nazi concentration camps. The book recounts simple acts of humanity between prisoners, far reaching acts of organised resistance (for example using the nazi's obsession with bureaucracy - people selected for extermination were saved by altering forms), to open acts of insurrection towards the end of the war.

Langbein, himself a key member of Combat Group Auschwitz, uses all the rigour and objectivity we expect of the serious historian. The book is an important contribution in these days when those who survived to bear witness are fewer and where the accounts by important witnesses such as Filip Muller, Hans Marsalek and Eugen Kogon, are out of print.

This book is especially important as evidence to counter the Holocaust denialists, and those who condemned Jewish and other people for "acting like sheep".