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Review
| Auschwitz: A New History, by Laurence Rees. New York: Public Affairs, 2005. 336 pages, $30.00, cloth.
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| Despite the seemingly ubiquitous use of "Auschwitz" as a byword for human depravity, a recent BBC survey found that 40 percent of the British population had never even heard the name of this most infamous of Nazi camps, and among those under 35, that figure rose to an astonishing 60 percent. Laurence Rees, a journalist and historian at the BBC, intends Auschwitz: A New History as a corrective to such widespread ignorance. Written as a companion to the six-hour documentary on Auschwitz, the book is based on over 100 interviews with camp survivors and Nazi perpetrators, many of whom speak on the record for the first time. Through the prism of a focused study of this one camp, Rees hopes to shed light on how the Nazis came to perpetrate the Holocaust. Rees' approach places him squarely in the "functionalist" school. He finds that the process of increasingly radical actions was the result of a series of decisions emerging out of the Nazi bureaucratic system. Rather than viewing individual Nazis as automatons who simply carried out orders unquestioningly, Rees reveals the high level of autonomy present at all levels of the Nazi state, an autonomy which allowed individuals such as Rudolf Höss, the primary commandant at Auschwitz, to experiment with various killing methods. Tracing the development of Auschwitz allows Rees to examine the nature of Nazi decision-making in all its complexities. |
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Auschwitz follows the history of the camp from its founding in 1940 as a quarantine camp for Poles to its transformation into a center for slave labor and finally a death camp. Originally built to hold 10,000 prisoners, Auschwitz was eventually expanded into a constellation of camps holding a total of 155,000 prisoners, making it the largest in the Nazi system. While commandant Höss had originally intended Auschwitz for agricultural research, two decisions reshaped the fate of the camp. The first was the decision of I.G. Farben to build a factory in Auschwitz, which pushed the camp towards industrial slave labor. The second was the high level Nazi decision known as the Final Solution which set out to annihilate European Jewry. Although it had not originally been built as one of the "Operation Reinhard" death camps, Auschwitz became one of the primary killing centers for Jews who lived outside of Poland. With the murder of Hungarian Jewry in 1944, the total number of people killed at Auschwitz reached 1.3 million and the camp became the site of the largest mass murder in history. |
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Rees' book is strongest in its exploration of parts of the camp's history often overlooked by the memoirs written by camp survivors, namely, its history prior to the arrival of significant numbers of Jewish prisoners in 1942, and the inner workings of the camp administration. Rees interviews several Polish prisoners from the first phase of the camp's history who describe its founding, its structure, and the treatment of prisoners. But it is the second area, the operation of the Nazi bureaucracy of the camp, where Rees' extensive research pays off. As over a million Jews arrived at Auschwitz, they were first stripped of their belongings and then either killed or enslaved. Their property was sorted and stored in a section of the camp known as "Canada," before being shipped back to Germany. Despite Himmler's orders for SS men to remain "pure," this wealth became a source of corruption that pervaded the power structure within the camp. Prisoners smuggled in food and money in order to buy privileges and obtain resources for survival. Through a series of interviews with camp guards, Rees paints a picture of an administration overwhelmed by the corruption of such a large amount of ready wealth. In fact, Höss himself was removed from his position in the fall of 1943 after an SS investigation, and was only brought back in May 1944 to oversee the murder of over 450,000 Hungarian Jews. |
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Surprisingly, the weakest part of the book is Rees' discussion of the treatment of Jewish prisoners in the camp. Rees brings forward several fascinating stories, including interviews with a survivor of Mengele's experiments, a woman whose gassing was prevented by the prisoner revolt of October 1944, and the bizarre account of a woman who was saved by an SS man who had fallen in love with her. Nonetheless, Auschwitz is more than an examination of the inner workings of one of the only combination slave labor/death camps in the Nazi system, it is a comprehensive description of the overall day-to-day horrors experienced by Jewish prisoners. As such, it serves as an excellent complement to the existing body of survivor narratives, such as those by Primo Levi, Filip Müller, and Elie Wiesel. |
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| California State University, Long Beach |
Jeffrey C. Blutinger |
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