Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp - Hardcover

Gutman, Yisrael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253326842 ISBN 13: 9780253326843

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1994

Synopsis

Leading scholars from the United States, Israel, Poland, and other European countries provide the first comprehensive account of what took place at the Auschwitz death camp. Principal sections of the book address the institutional history of the camp, the technology and dimensions of the genocide carried out there, the profiles of the perpetrators and the lives of the inmates, underground resistance and escapes, and what the outside world knew about Auschwitz and when.

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Reviews

In original essays, some 20 scholars from the U.S., Israel and Europe contribute to a comprehensive portrait of the largest and most lethal of the Nazi death camps. If the book lacks the drive of a narrative history, it nonetheless serves as a vital contribution to Holocaust studies and a bulwark against forgetting. Several essays are notable. Franciszek Piper describes how Auschwitz exploited prisoners as laborers before exterminating them, and Robert-Jan Van Pelt discusses how Auschwitz was the focus of "a Faustian project to create a German paradise amid Polish perdition." Aleksander Lasik writes on camp commandant Rudolf Hoss, a dutiful functionary who neither evaded responsibility nor was troubled by conscience. Hermann Langbein, a former prisoner himself, recounts prisoner efforts at resistance, ranging from smuggling medicine supplied by the Polish underground to the only major rebellion in the camp's history, the blowing up of a crematorium, which "cannot be exactly recounted." David Wyman argues that the U.S. military evaded bombing the camp because they considered rescuing Jews to be an "extraneous problem" and an "unwanted burden." Newly authoritative information is included in several essays, including one by Jean-Claude Pressac, a French investigator and former Holocaust denier, on the construction of the gas chambers and crematoria, and another by Piper that assesses the number of victims as at least 1.1 million, 90% of them Jews. Gutman directs the Research Center at Yad Vashem in Israel; Berenbaum directs the Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An immensely wide and deep collection of reports on the infrastructure, operation, population, and history of the Auschwitz death-camp complex. Contributions by 27 contributors from several countries are compiled for this publication of the new US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Research Institute. (Berenbaum is director of the Research Institute; Gutman is professor of Jewish history at Hebrew University and director of the Research Center at Yad Vashem.) This anthology is a companion volume to Auschwitz: A History in Photographs (1993) in association with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland. The contributors range from Polish scholars able for the first time to access archives in former Communist countries to established WW II historians like Martin Gilbert. Because Auschwitz was a concentration camp, a death camp, and a forced- labor camp, the Nazi's largest such complex, it warrants the comprehensive and multidimensional treatment it gets here. The first two parts offer an overview of the physical operation of the camp, with a statistical study concluding that 1.5 million victims perished there (90% of these being Jews). Among the essays here is one by Jean-Claude Pressac, the Frenchman who has done groundbreaking research into the construction and operation of Auschwitz. Parts III and IV examine perpetrators of the atrocities, from managers like Rudolf Hess to doctors like Josef Mengele, and their inmate victims (broken down by ethnicity, gender, age and health). We read from a psychologist how inmates were broken and turned into ``automatons, obeying orders without thinking.'' It is all the more remarkable that any resistance occurred in Auschwitz, such as the revolt of October 7, 1944, when crematorium IV was blown up and inmates ``managed to overpower the German kapo and throw him, still alive, into one of the ovens.'' Examinations of what the world knew about the complex, why Auschwitz wasn't bombed, and select literature of the camp rounds out the collection. These thoroughly researched and annotated reports add up to a one-volume study of Auschwitz without peer in Holocaust literature. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this work, leading scholars from the United States, Israel, Poland, and other European countries contribute essays about Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi death camps, where more than a million people were murdered. Contributors include Yehuda Bauer, Raul Hilberg, Randolph Braham, Lawrence Langer, and Jean-Claude Pressac. Various aspects of Auschwitz are covered, including its history, the theory of genocide by the Nazis, physical details of the camp and of the killing, profiles of inmates and of the Nazis, resistance and escapes, and what the rest of the world knew about Auschwitz. This comprehensive study of Auschwitz provides a multidisciplinary analysis of the death camp from the viewpoints of historians, psychologists, sociologists, art historians, physicians, and chemists. Recommended for all libraries.
Mary Salony, West Virginia Northern Comm. Coll. Lib., Wheeling
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253326842
• ISBN 13: 9780253326843
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 638
• Editor: Piper Franciszek, Hillberg Raul, Hilberg Raul