Auschwitz
by Deborah Dwork, Robert Jan Van Pelt (Author)
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Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present elucidates how the prewar ordinary town of Auschwitz became Germany's most lethal killing site step by step and in stages: a transformation wrought by human beings, mostly German and mostly male. Who were the men who conceived, created, and constructed the killing facility? What were they thinking as they inched their way to iniquity? Using the hundreds of architectural plans for the camp that the Germans, in their haste, forgot to destroy, as well as show more blueprints and papers in municipal, provincial, and federal archives, Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt show that the town of Auschwitz and the camp of that name were the centerpiece of Himmler's ambitious project to recover the German legacy of the Teutonic Knights and Frederick the Great in Nazi-ruled Poland. Analyzing the close ties between the 700-year history of the town and the five-year evolution of the concentration camp in its suburbs, Dwork and van Pelt offer an absolutely new and compelling interpretation of the origins and development of the death camp at Auschwitz. And drawing on oral histories of survivors, memoirs, depositions, and diaries, the authors explore the ever more murderous impact of these changes on the inmates' daily lives. show lessTags
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7+ Works 709 Members
The American-born Deborah Dwork and the Dutch-born Robert Jan Van Pelt met in London in 1981. Dwork is an internationally renowned social historian of the Holocaust, whose classic Children With A Star gave voice to the silenced youngsters caught in the net of Nazism. She is the founding director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and show more Genocide Studies, and Rose Professor of Holocaust History, at Clark University. Van Pelt is professor of cultural history in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo. He acted as an expert witness to defend history against Holocaust-denier David Irving. His definitive book, The Case for Auschwitz, presents the courtroom drama of his testimony -- which served to win the case and defeat Irving show less
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Common Knowledge
- Original title
- Auschwitz. 1270 to the Present
- Original publication date
- 1996
- Important places
- Auschwitz concentration camp, Oświęcim, Lesser Poland, Poland
- Important events
- Holocaust
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Statistics
- Members
- 205
- Popularity
- 159,384
- Rating
- (4.18)
- Languages
- Dutch, English, French, German
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 8
