Auschwitz

Archival Summary & Scope

“Scrupulous and honest” (Washington Post), this history of Auschwitz, the Holocaust's most notorious concentration camp, offers new insights into humanity's largest mass murder. Laurence Rees draws on over 100 original interviews with survivors and Nazi perpetrators, many speaking on the record for the first time, to detail the camp's inner workings. From mass murder techniques and camp politics to the blurred lines of its infamous brothel, these testimonies reveal the strategic decisions behind Auschwitz's role as the primary site for Hitler and Himmler’s "Final Solution." Rees concludes that the camp's horrors arose from a terrible immoral pragmatism, showing how evil progressed incrementally to industrial-scale slaughter.