The Good Old Days

Volker Riess, Willi Dressen

ISBN 10: 0029174252 / ISBN 13: 9780029174258

Published by Free Press, 1991

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Good Old Days
• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication Date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0029174252
• ISBN 13: 9780029174258
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Gathers selections from the diaries, letters, and confidential reports of those who participated in the Holocaust

Reviews

The title refers to a caption in the scrapbook of Kurt Franz, the commandant of the Treblinka concentration camp. Underneath the heading "Those Were the Days," and reproduced here, are pictures of smiling officers at a site where some 700,000 people were exterminated in the gas chambers. To refute revisionist historians who negate the testimony of Holocaust survivors, and to disprove those Germans who said they were coerced into murdering Jews, the German authors--Klee is a journalist, Dressen a lawyer and Riess a historian--present the damning and harrowing diaries, letters, photo albums and official reports of Germans who willingly participated in the Final Solution. A member of a unit that killed 33,771 Jews in the Ukranian Babi Yar ravine boasts: "It's almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work down there." Of the annihilation of thousands of Jews in White Russia, a commander says, "The action rid me of unneccessary mouths to feed." And wagging its tail for the camera is Franz's dog, which on numerous occasions was set upon Jews to bite off their genitals.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

As the first sentence of the foreword states, "This is a horrible book to read, and yet one that should be read." Klee, Willi Dresen, and Volker Riess have compiled a brutal and chilling rebuttal to the revisionist historians who question the statistics on, as well as the very existence of, the "final solution." This book is a collection of interviews, photographs, diary entries, and reports from German eyewitnesses, including members of the SS. They offer frightening insight into the mindset of the people who carried out the attempted extermination of an entire race. A disturbing, necessary reminder of the past and a warning for the future, this is recommended for larger public libraries as well as special collections.
- D.L. Braddock, Corbit-Calloway Memorial Lib., Odessa, Del.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.