Auschwitz : The Nazis & The 'Final Solution' [Paperback]

This book excels when reading interviews from the survivors because it is there that we are able to discover the real horrors and read about some of the atrocities that went on inside which leave a profound sadnes of the reader. What's so bad is that this was able to happen and the fact that it is not that long ago, many people have had this happen in their lifetime. Luckily there are not just horror stories in the book and there is a lot of detail on transportation and relations between countries. There are many figures available although they may not be totally accurate because of the nature of the event.

Buy this book if you are wanting to find out about the camp, the Holocaust, the human mind and what drives us to evil and some opinions from people who were actually there. Well done to Laurence Rees on this spectacular, obsessive read!

For the most part, Rees' book is highly accessible, especially given the emotional volatility of his subject matter. He achieves a laudable degree of balance and objectivity, avoiding the urge to be judgemental. Present the facts - the reader is well capable of making his/her own judgement.

The central theme is that Auschwitz was not simply a death camp. It was conceived as an industrial complex, as a profit-making concern which would wring the maximum work from a force of slave labourers. German industry profited from it ... and, in due course, the complex that was Auschwitz would be run on industrial principles as its managers created a production line of death.

Mass murder, here, was a process. Over a million would be murdered in Auschwitz, but the thousands of people who contributed to its operation were, for the main, 'ordinary' people. The writer Hannah Arendt commented that she attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the German officer in charge of the final solution: she had expected to look into the face of evil; instead, she found herself facing an innocuous, petty bourgeois, bald, insignificant old man, devoutly sticking to the mantra that he had only been following orders and couldn't be held responsible. [ See Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil".]

Rees demonstrates that the thousands of bureaucrats, workers, even the guards, were simple jobsworths who rubber stamped murder and treated genocide as a matter of double-entry accounting. The victims were a commodity to be processed, stripped of their dignity, stripped of their humanity, sent to their death packed into cattle wagons. It was a job. How many this week? Evil is not a matter of consciously deciding to commit some horrific act or uphold an abominable philosophy: evil is simply ordinary people not questioning, not objecting ... because they are too scared, too greedy, too busy, or so corrupted that they accept that someone else is no longer to be regarded as human, someone else deserves their fate.

The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, was an ambitious Nazi functionary whose business management skills were devoted to the task of making the executions more efficient and cost-effective - finding better, less costly ways to kill in numbers and then dispose of the bodies.

The great evil here is the blind conviction that the individual can abdicate responsibility, that s/he is only following orders. Even Jews collaborated in murdering others. What is most disturbing about the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is that genocide is still occurring - it is only a matter of years since it last flared up in Europe in the former Yugoslavia. And when Rees analyses the way the Jews were made less than human in the decades before the outbreak of World War 2, it's worth considering how readily we can all demonise and dehumanise others because of their religion, race, nationality, or whatever.

Laurence Rees offers a thoroughly researched account of the building and role of Auschwitz, made all the more vivid by the wealth of first hand accounts he includes. It seems that half of Britain's teenagers have never heard of Auschwitz. Rees demonstrates precisely why it is vital everyone is reminded of the name - it is only too easy to find yourself acting as a jobsworth, turning a blind eye to this or that. Chilling, disturbing, but essential reading. [For the interested, I'd also recommend Primo Levi's "If This Is a Man", the account of a survivor, and Deborah Dwork's "Auschwitz", where she dissects how the town became the centre of death.]

In this book Rees does not shy away from difficult questions which he poses throughout the book on either side of this horrific divide. His manner is even and balanced and in the course of posing questions he also attempts to provide responses to and interpretations of possible answers. Ironically, suggested answers to some questions posed show a coalescence between oppressor and victim; here I am specifically referring to how Rees describes, using personal testimony, that the camp experience made changes to the behaviour and the essential character of individuals. One survivor describes human beings as really not knowing themselves in ordinary life. This knowing he refers to can manifest itself under extremity into a terrifying awfulness translated into action.

There are generalised descriptions associated with Nazi policy and the occupation of countries down to the most intimate and harrowing descriptions of survivors. In representing these personal accounts Rees allows the witness to speak for him or herself. Their accounts need no interpretation or supporting statement. Without drama or embellishment, the witnesses describe facts of their lives: appalling and degrading in some cases which seem to wholly support Elie Wiesel's description of the camp as arriving at 'planet Auschwitz.'

What does this book contribute to the large amount of textual, photographic, documentary or cinematic information on the subject of the Holocaust? I am not sure I agree with Ian Kershaw's description that "Rees casts new light on how Auschwitz was created and developed..." We knew before this book was written how the camp was created and how its function developed. I consider the merit of this book is to be a distillation of these facts into a single text supported by personal testimony (much of which is new) and set against the backdrop of a criminal ideology in time of war. By skilful use of previously published material, Rees allows a reader access to the camp commandant Hoess. There is no painting of a 'monster' here the monstrosity of Auschwitz is in the banal detail of its daily function; almost as if it was a bona fide organisation or processing plant. Hoess remained committed to the principle of the rightness of the Final Solution until the end. Discharged at one time from his post as commandant, he was eager to be returned in order to continue his work. He was not an uncontrollable sadist, crazed and unreasonable. Hoess believed. Believed in the ideology, and was not simply 'following orders.' Therefore, to view Jews as a danger and threat to security and the health of the Reich requiring extermination was not a personal crusade, it was an ideological imperative to which he subscribed. Rees makes an extremely interesting comparison (on page 172) between a survivor's faith in God and Hoess' ideological position and 'belief' in National Socialism. As Rees points out we should be very careful not to make a glib or crude comparison, certainly as the survivor in the story uses her belief to commit acts of compassion and care (unlike the SS). However, the point is made to demonstrate Hoess' state of mind throughout and his commitment to these horrors committed.

It is painful and distressing for a reader so far away from this experience to read the pages of this important book. Auschwitz was not the only factory of death, but due to its size, the numbers murdered and that it stands today, it is a symbol and focus of the Final Solution for much of the world. Ultimately Auschwitz is beyond words or description. We, thankfully outside of the experience, shall never really know its hell.