Auschwitz : a new history / Laurence Rees.
Rees, Laurence, 1957-
2005
D805.5.A96 R44 2005 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection

Items

Details

Title Auschwitz : a new history / Laurence Rees.
Author Rees, Laurence, 1957-
ISBN 9781586483579 (pbk.)
1586483579 (pbk.)
9781586483036
158648303X
Publication Details New York : Public Affairs, 2005.
Language English
Description xxii, 327 p. ; 24 cm.
Call Number D805.5.A96 R44 2005
Alternate Call Number 15.70
Dewey Decimal Classification 940.53/1853858
Summary Auschwitz-Birkenau is the site of the largest mass murder in human history. Yet its story is not fully known. In Auschwitz, Laurence Rees reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews with Auschwitz survivors and Nazi perpetrators who speak on the record for the first time. Their testimonies provide a portrait of the inner workings of the camp in unrivalled detail-from the techniques of mass murder, to the politics and gossip mill that turned between guards and prisoners, to the on-camp brothel in which the lines between those guards and prisoners became surprisingly blurred. Rees examines the strategic decisions that led the Nazi leadership to prescribe Auschwitz as its primary site for the extinction of Europe's Jews-their "Final Solution." He concludes that many of the horrors that were perpetrated in Auschwitz were driven not just by ideological inevitability but as a "practical" response to a war in the East that had begun to go wrong for Germany. A terrible immoral pragmatism characterizes many of the decisions that determined what happened at Auschwitz. Thus the story of the camp becomes a morality tale, too, in which evil is shown to proceed in a series of deft, almost noiseless incremental steps until it produces the overwhelming horror of the industrial scale slaughter that was inflicted in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Insights gleaned from more than one hundred original interviews shed new light on history's most famous death camp, with the testimonies of survivors providing a detailed and chilling portrait of the camp's inner workings, in a companion volume to the PBS documentary.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references (p. [301]-312) and index.
Linked Resources Table of contents only
Record Appears in On-Campus Resources > Books
All Resources
Surprising beginnings
Orders and initiatives
Factories of death
Corruption
Frenzied killing
Liberation and retribution.

Browse Subjects

Show more subjects...

Statistics

from
to
Export