AUSCHWITZ The Nazis & The Final Solution: Book Review

AUSCHWITZ The Nazis & The Final Solution: Book Review

Professor Sir Ian Kershew said of `Auschwitz – The Nazis and the Final Solution’
“Laurence Rees has cast new light on how Auschwitz was created and developed into the ultimate place of horror.”
Professor David Cesarai said:  ”A history of Auschwitz that is accessible and authoritative.”
The author, Antony Beevor, said: “Rees’ great urge to comprehend the mentality of the SS camp administrators and guards is fired not just by a passionate curiosity, but by an intellectual honesty that the subject needs.”

AUSCHWITZ-The Nazis & The Final Solution by Laurence Rees is a shocking account of man’s inhumanity to man. I started reading this book as bedtime reading but, after a few evenings, I could no longer continue reading it just before falling off to sleep. The cruelty man is capable of; even the cruelest animal on the planet could not match.

After reading this book, I can now understand why the Russians were so ruthless when the Germans were retreating from the Russian front. I did not realise that in the seven months of the war against the Soviet Union, the Germans took three million Red Army prisoners and, through the course of the war as a whole, 5.7 million, of whom a staggering 3.3 million lost their lives in captivity.

Auschwitz was built as a concentration camp and later developed into a camp for the purpose of mass murder of the disabled, the infirm, Jews, Gypsies and others from countries all over Europe – the Polish Jews in particular suffered untold cruelty.
In total, 1.1 million human beings – men, women and children – were murdered in this one camp alone. When questioned after the war, the commandant of the camp, Rudolf Hoess, did not see any wrong in what they had done; he had simply obeyed orders from Heinrich Himmler who it appears, as you read this book, was even more enthusiastic about the killings than was Hitler.

The book casts a sad and cruel reflection on Nazi German history between 1938 and 1945.

The feeling I had while reading this book was a kind of hopelessness and I asked the question, “Why?” Why was this horror allowed to happen? Our world goverments knew it was going on but did little. In fact, history records that it was mostly individuals, a mere handful of people, who helped thousands to escape. The European and American governments were focused on the war to the exclusion of the holocaust. And as we know, for them the war was not about saving the six million Jews who perished, but saving themselves from Nazi occupation.

I recommend this book as a well researched and recorded piece of modern history, showing man at his worst.

PS. I found it difficult, in fact impossible, to understand such extreme hatred, toward the Jews in particular, and why it remains so today. I can only think of one possible answer, one a friend and scholar gave to me. ”It’s Spiritual. It’s beyond our understanding.”