Auschwitz: A History

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My first exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust occurred in the early ‘60s. My sixth-grade teacher—a Holocaust survivor—told us stories about her confinement and even showed us her tattoo to support her story. Later, as a freshman in college, I had a professor of German language who had escaped from one of the Nazi concentration camps. She told us about her experience walking across the Alps to freedom. Since then, I have read a number of history books that have added to my mental picture of these camps, starting with Jean-François Steiner’s book Treblinka in the late ‘60s. Nevertheless, after reading Laurence Rees’s book Auschwitz: A New History, I discovered that there was still much I did not know about the horror of these extermination camps.

One of the reasons Auschwitz has loomed so large in the public imagination is because there are so many survivors from all across Europe writing memoirs in all European languages and representing quite different communities—whether the French Resistance or the Polish resistance or Greek Jews or Hungarian Jews. There were many, many different communities who could subsequently identify with survivors after the war and who provided audiences for their memoirs and publications and accounts.

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At the same time, the political parties in Austria were concerned to rehabilitate and integrate former Nazis. A lot of political pressure was put on judges, prosecutors and defence attorneys to ensure acquittals. From 1955 onwards, there were very few cases indeed in Austria. Those that were brought tended to end in acquittals; then from the mid-1970s the trials simply dried up entirely. Only in West Germany did they refuse to adopt Nuremburg principles. In East Germany, they adopted a much broader definition which had to do with the fact that somebody was dead at the end of a process. In East Germany, former Nazis were six or seven times more likely to be prosecuted and convicted as in West Germany.

I'm not sure I can do a book like this justice in a review other than to say it was an excellent compliment to other readings I've done to this point. Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. By signing up you agree to our terms of use All But My Life: A Memoir by Gerda Weissman KleinThat’s an intriguing point you make about the interest in survivors’ memoirs and survivors’ testimony only taking off in the 1970s. What was it that changed around that time? We remember this—probably quite rightly—as an almost uniquely horrific crime in human history, and yet in the immediate aftermath of the war, it doesn’t seem to have registered in the way that one would have expected it to . . . It's ironic that as I write this, my boy is watching "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" at school today, as part of their learning about the World War. It makes me sad that he is watching it, as despite being well made, the film is so utterly depressing, but on the other hand, I think he's at the age where he needs to know exactly what humans were capable of. There were brothels with working prostitutes inside Auschwitz to motivate the Germans (Kapos and guards), their unwilling but had no choice cohorts (Sonderkommandos) and even the Jews. Unlike the comfort women in Korea, the Philippines, etc. the prostitutes here were not forced as they were paid for their services (and they "give what one wants").