Auschwitz: A New History

Title: Auschwitz: A New History [amazon]
Author: Laurence Rees
Publisher: PublicAffairs; Export Ed edition (January 4, 2005)
Pages: 327
Book Number: 16

What’s this 52 Books in 52 Weeks thing about?

I finished this book up a few days ago. I’m hesitant to say I “enjoyed” it, because it’s obviously about a pretty depressing topic. My feelings on it, I suppose, are similar to my feelings about the movie Schindler’s List. “Enjoyable”? No, not really. But something I think most people should read, to have an idea of what went on at Auschwitz, how it happened, and (the most difficult question of all) why? Yes.

The book is based around over 100 different interviews the BBC did with former inmates, as well as former SS (Schutzstaffel) members who worked at Auschwitz or other similar death camps. The picture that ends up being painted is both revealing and bizarre. From the little I had read on the topic previously, I assumed that the vast majority of SS members used the old “I was following orders” card. While that holds true to a degree - many of them stated that they disagreed with what they were doing, but did it anyway because it was an order from above - many of them didn’t use this excuse. Many said up until their dying day (which was just in the past few years for a few of them) that what they had done was right, that they took part in the mass murder of Jews because they felt it was the right thing for Germany to do. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943, was one of the men who felt that there wasn’t anything wrong with what they did. One of the major reasons for this was the success of Goebbel’s huge propaganda machine; many of the SS members who thought what they were doing was right saw all Jews not simply as “subhumans”, but as enemies of Germany. They saw the Jews as the cause of German defeat in World War I, and basically every other problem Germany experienced as well. To the warped minds of many of the SS members, what they were doing was not genocide, but an act of war - they were killing their enemies. In their eyes, what they were doing was no different from what other German soldiers were doing on the front when they shot enemies. I’m not really sure what is more scary - that the propaganda worked so well when it was first used, or that many SS members clung to the idea until their deaths, years later.

Overall, the book was well made. It did suffer from a few things, however:

• Poor editing in many places. Due to the nature of the book, there are many names which (to the English-speaking eye) have complicated spellings, particularly the Polish names of the inmates. I came across many instances where the name was spelled one way initially, and then a different way later on - sometimes even on the same page. This isn’t a huge deal, but it’s not something I really like to see in a history book.Another peculiarity: the full name of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, was misspelled in the entire book. The correct spelling begins with Sch; in the book, both in the body of it as well as in the index, it is spelled as Shutzstaffel. As far as I know, there are no words in German which begin with Sh. If the “sh” sound is at the beginning of a word, it’s spelled sch. There’s really no excuse for this blunder. Considering the topic at hand and how involved the SS were in the mass murder, one would think they’d get the spelling of the organization right.

  There were also quite a few grammatical mistakes where a verb was left out - something that Word or any other decent word processor would have marked as incorrect.

• When a quote from an inmate or guard / SS member was quoted, it received a superscripted number, which pointed the reader to the back of the book for the source of the quote. Unfortunately, this is practically useless in the case of the quotes from interviews. Why? Because they all refer simply to “BBC interview.” No interview number; no name of who was being interviewed. So essentially, the “source” list is ultimately a huge list of “BBC interview” repeated over and over. Not very helpful at all.

Despite those issues, however, it’s still a good book. While it could use some editing love, the content is generally educational and well done. If you’re interested in learning about the Holocaust, I can definitely recommend this book.