Auschwitz: A New History

Rating:
Summary: A Haunting Sadness
Review: This is an incredible book, as well as the PBS Series. I have read so much on the Holocaust, but oh, does this book ever bring out things beyond belief. How can time ever begin to lessen such pain and horrors?
As Mr. Matlock, a previous reviewer here has also pointed out, I was totally aghast by the attitudes of the former Nazi soldiers interviewed in recent years, who had no remorse whatsoever for their deeds, and STILL firmly believe that what they did was needed. All the MORE reason why the world needs
to be reminded of what hate forever destroys.

Rating:
Summary: Evil as an industrial process
Review: A book which parallels the BBC television series on Auschwitz ... and one which can most effectively be read in conjunction with a viewing of the series (either on television or DVD). The BBC has developed considerable skill in combining scholarly but accessible written and visual history, and this is no exception.

For the most part, Rees' book is highly accessible, especially given the emotional volatility of his subject matter. He achieves a laudable degree of balance and objectivity, avoiding the urge to be judgemental. Present the facts - the reader is well capable of making his/her own judgement.

The central theme is that Auschwitz was not simply a death camp. It was conceived as an industrial complex, as a profit-making concern which would wring the maximum work from a force of slave labourers. German industry profited from it ... and, in due course, the complex that was Auschwitz would be run on industrial principles as its managers created a production line of death.

Mass murder, here, was a process. Over a million would be murdered in Auschwitz, but the thousands of people who contributed to its operation were, for the main, 'ordinary' people. The writer Hannah Arendt commented that she attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the German officer in charge of the final solution: she had expected to look into the face of evil; instead, she found herself facing an innocuous, petty bourgeois, bald, insignificant old man, devoutly sticking to the mantra that he had only been following orders and couldn't be held responsible. [ See Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil".]

Rees demonstrates that the thousands of bureaucrats, workers, even the guards, were simple jobsworths who rubber stamped murder and treated genocide as a matter of double-entry accounting. The victims were a commodity to be processed, stripped of their dignity, stripped of their humanity, sent to their death packed into cattle wagons. It was a job. How many this week? Evil is not a matter of consciously deciding to commit some horrific act or uphold an abominable philosophy: evil is simply ordinary people not questioning, not objecting ... because they are too scared, too greedy, too busy, or so corrupted that they accept that someone else is no longer to be regarded as human, someone else deserves their fate.

The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, was an ambitious Nazi functionary whose business management skills were devoted to the task of making the executions more efficient and cost-effective - finding better, less costly ways to kill in numbers and then dispose of the bodies.

The great evil here is the blind conviction that the individual can abdicate responsibility, that s/he is only following orders. Even Jews collaborated in murdering others. What is most disturbing about the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is that genocide is still occurring - it is only a matter of years since it last flared up in Europe in the former Yugoslavia. And when Rees analyses the way the Jews were made less than human in the decades before the outbreak of World War 2, it's worth considering how readily we can all demonise and dehumanise others because of their religion, race, nationality, or whatever.

Laurence Rees offers a thoroughly researched account of the building and role of Auschwitz, made all the more vivid by the wealth of first hand accounts he includes. It seems that half of Britain's teenagers have never heard of Auschwitz. Rees demonstrates precisely why it is vital everyone is reminded of the name - it is only too easy to find yourself acting as a jobsworth, turning a blind eye to this or that. Chilling, disturbing, but essential reading. [For the interested, I'd also recommend Primo Levi's "If This Is a Man", the account of a survivor, and Deborah Dwork's "Auschwitz", where she dissects how the town became the centre of death.]

Rating:
Summary: Industrial Strength Killing
Review: Innumerable books have talked about Auschwitz, but this is the first time that I've seen a whole book about it. The detail in this book is incredible. A surprising part of the book is the current attitude of the guards that were interviewed. They do not give the standard only following orders but still believe that the monstrous acts they performed were proper.

The book covers every aspect from the basic decisions to establish Auschwitz, to the transportation system, to the social impacts. This book has a wealth of information and is extremely well written.


Rating:
Summary: Definitve Book Unveils the Horrid Significance of Auschwitz
Review: Laurence Rees is a fine scholar and a fine writer and has the courage to present an historical summary of the one of the most horror-laden atrocities of the twentieth century - the Nazi camp called Auschwitz. Even the name conjures up loathing and nausea and near disbelief that such unimaginable mass killings, human medical experimentation, torture, and genocide could have possibly been real. But without denying any of the truths well documented since the Nuremberg Trials, Rees explores the initial beginnings of the concepts for the camp and the events that lead the Third Reich to push this Polish town site into world memory.

World War I laid the seeds for the rise of German resentment for the loss of a war they felt was turned against them. At the core, in search for a causative factor, the Jews were perceived as the evil reason for Germany's losses. Not that anti-Semitism was limited to Germany: Rees wisely shows that those feelings were fairly widespread throughout the world. Yet it took the early fanatics that included Adolph Hitler to strive to purify Germany, rid the fatherland of the useless consumers of food that robbed the Germans of their rightful needs, and repatriate lost Germans to the fatherland at any cost. Rees postulates (with excellent quotations from both Nazi perpetrators and concentration camp survivors throughout this book) that the primary goal of creating concentration camps such as Auschwitz was to provide way stations for gathering non-Germans for deportation to make room for the return of 'lebensraum' for those of pure German blood.

The progress from these initial postulates to the eventual conversion of the concentration camps as places for extermination of not only Jews but also any 'outsiders' ending with the gassing and cremation of millions of human beings is the trail Rees outlines for the reader. He also uses his hundreds of interviews with camp survivors to explore the inner workings of the camps, from the hierarchy of the Capos, the survival techniques, the trading issues with the Poles outside the camps, the brothels within the camps that serviced not only the Guards but also the inmates, and the day to day mechanisms of progressive annihilation of the inmates.

This book is not easy reading: the approach is scholarly yet fascinating and the subject matter can induce waves of nausea in even the most iron-willed reader. But the book is terribly important. If our response to the Nazi genocide camps is only one-sided horror without the information as to how such camps evolved from first idea to ultimate tragedy, then we stand to see history repeat itself. We need only to look at Abu Ghraib, Sudan, and other contemporary mini-counterparts to see how feasible this line of thought is. This is a very important book and recommended to everyone who cares about the human race. Grady Harp, January 2005

Rating:
Summary: Readable History
Review: This is a very good history of Auschwitz. It's the companion to the PBS/BBC series. I recommend it to anyone who wants to know what happened there; how rational people come to participate in an irrational idea. This is a book to give to anyone who says that the Holocaust didn't happen.

Rating:
Summary: Historical page turner
Review: This is one of the best books that I have read on the holocaust. The Mr. Rees has centered the story around Auschwitz but puts it into the context of the Nazi solution for the Jews. Using personal stories and interviews from both sides to explore the feelings and motives makes for a thought provoking read. The personal stories of courage and faith show the few shining lights in what is a black period of history.