Awards

• Commended for National Jewish Book Award (Jewish Life) 2006

Overview

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.

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9781586483579

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Reviews

""Excellent.""--Boyd Tonkin, The Independent ""Thank God that occasionally books of the stature of Laurence Rees's superb Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ""Final Solution"" are published... Fascinating.""--Andrew Roberts, Evening Standard ""Well-written with striking testimonies from bystanders, perpetrators and victims. The interviews with SS men, and sundry European Fascists, are genuinely revealing, and must have been exceptionally difficult to negotiate.""--Michael Burleigh, Daily Telegraph ""A path-breaking work...the depth and wealth of detail Rees provides make this treatment highly compelling.""--Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""This admirable book deserves to be widely read.""--Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris and Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis ""This book distills a crucial lesson--perhaps the crucial lesson--of the 20th century: that the human capacity for mass murder is grotesquely widespread and must be faced squarely if we hope to resist it.""--Washington Post

Author Information

Laurence Rees is Creative Director of History Programs for the BBC and author of five books, including The Nazis: A Warning from History and Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II. He lives in London.

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