Excellent history of not just Auschwitz really, but of the significance of Hitler and his cronies agenda. Very interesting and credible interpretation, one that I would recommend everybody read. This is a little different, a lot harsher account, than you may get in high school or even college. ( )

For the reader well versed in the Holocaust, Rees's book probably won't add much new information, but for readers seeking an introduction to the Final Solution it is definitely worth a try. Rees's decision to use the history of one camp only (Auschwitz) to tell the story of the much broader Final Solution is a clever one and he manages to illustrate the different phases and aspects of the Holocaust. He shows how the Nazis did not start out with a extermination master plan; the killing came about only gradually, the gassing by trial and error. That Auschwitz - unlike other camps - was a concentration, work and death camp all in one, also serves Rees's purpose of trying to cover all aspects of the Holocaust well. Finally, the focus on Auschwitz allows Rees to bring the narrative down to 'ground level' where history becomes 'real'; our sensory system is not numbed by abstract figures and statistics. Good read. ( )

Excellent, though not exactly cheery reading. Rees - who is rapidly becoming the go-to guy for historical analysis of genocide and war crime in the Twentieth Century - details how Auschwitz became the most illustrative and extreme expression of the Nazi Regime in all its insanity, its murderousness and its incompetence.

It's the incompetence that comes as a surprise. Despite the myth that Nazis were highly organised and efficient, Rees demonstrates that the regime was a clumsy and bumbling mess of conflicting and competing bureaucracies that worked, usually against each other, to find ways to impress Hitler by putting his insane but largely abstract ideas into action.

Rees also dismisses the idea of the SS as mindless automatons who simply "obeyed orders" without question or thought. Far from simply doing as instructed, SS officers and even lower ranks were actually given wide parameters for their "duties" and it was consistently *them* who came up with ways to kill and dispose of their victims; often with ingenuity and always with enthusiasm. Many of the most horrific elements of the death factories for which Auschwitz was the model did not come from orders from the "top" but from innovations from the bottom.

Rees further argues that its the industrialisation and depersonalisation that became built into the process that sets the Holocaust apart from other genocides and crimes against humanity. He also makes a compelling case for Auschwitz as a microcosm of the Nazi regime generally.

At times the detailed description of how this industrialisation of mass murder is so methodical that the Nazis' insane ideas almost start to take on a kind of perverse logic. But every two pages or so a particularly macabre detail amongst the catalogues of official memos and lists of transport schedules snaps the reader back to a realisation of what it is that Rees is explaining.

Eye witness accounts of the sand covering a new mass grave moving and writhing as wounded victims tried to fight their way out of the mass of fresh corpses or a bizarre column of the prams of gassed children, five prams wide and taking an hour to go past, are images that are hard to forget.

This will probably be the definitive history of Auschwitz for decades to come and deservedly so. Chilling but superb.

The story of Auschwitz, told both in the context of the camp itself, and in the context of the war overall and the Nazi's extermination efforts in particular. I learned much about the workings of the extermination camps, and how Auschwitz - a hybrid camp - was a creature unto itself. Richly researched, the story is made even more compelling by the use of first person accounts. Stories of people in the ghettoes, in the camps, and even of a person who was in a gas chamber to be executed without knowing it (and who survived because of a rebellion by the Sonderkomandos that morning) - all help add layers to the clinical story of the camp and its operations. Recommended. ( )

Fabulous, loved it. Have hand sold this book to several people. The DVD documentary is equally as good. ( )