Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp

“This learned volume is about as chilling as historiography gets.” —Walter Laqueur, The New Republic
“… a one-volume study of Auschwitz without peer in Holocaust literature.” —Kirkus Reviews
“… a comprehensive portrait of the largest and most lethal of the Nazi death camps… serves as a vital contribution to Holocaust studies and a bulwark against forgetting.”A —Publishers Weekly
More than a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, of whom 90 percent were Jews. Here leading scholars from around the world provide the first comprehensive account of what took place at Auschwitz.

Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, edited by Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, is probably the most comprehensive volume on Auschwitz in print. Essays by leading scholars from Europe, Israel, and the United States document the history of the camp, the technology and magnitude of the genocide that occurred there, profiles of the inmates and the Nazis who ran the camp (such as Joseph Mengele), the underground resistance that arose, and what the outside world knew about Auschwitz and when. It’s not a book to read straight through because of the sheer volume of information (more than 600 pages of text) and the horror of its contents. But it’s the best resource for answering a wide variety of questions about the camp, especially those raised by the many excellent memoirs by the survivors. –Michael Joseph Gross

"Resistance was almost impossible in Auschwitz, where disobedience meant torture and death, for one’s peers as well as oneself. Nevertheless, it occurred. The most notable instance was that of the Sonderkommando that seized a crematorium.

Just months before the liberation of the camp, when it was already known that the Russian army was approaching, the SS caught wind of the fact that the last of the Sonderkommando–the squads of Jewish prisoners formed to shepherd their fellows to the gas chamber– were planning an uprising. They determined to eliminate them all.

On October 7, 1944, as the SS were forming a detail of three hundred members of the Sonderkommando for some outside work (this was thought to be a ruse to separate and execute them) the Sonderkommando began pelting the SS with stones and drove them off. They packed crematorium IV with explosives they had "organized" or stolen, and blew it up. Eighty to one hundred trucks of SS men arrived and the Sonderkommando fought them with stolen machine guns and grenades they had been stockpiling; the SS responded in kind and by unleashing fifty attack dogs.

Sonderkommando in other units rose up too; some seized crematorium II and threw an SS man and a kapo into the furnace alive. Some men cut holes in the barbed wire and fled, but in the wrong direction, remaining within the larger confines of the extended camp. The SS trapped some in a barn and set fire to it, and hunted others down in the woods; by the end of the day, hundreds of members of the Sonderkommando had been burned or shot to death.

After the revolt was put down, the remaining two hundred members of the Sonderkommando were executed, some with flamethrowers."
Friedrich

this is sad photo of a jewish memorial at Auschwitz concentration camp.

Mothers and fathers, children, babies too
Gone in a blink into the empty sky
Their simple crime was being born a Jew.

Hard to believe whole countries never knew.
Too terrified, perhaps, to even try
Imagine what a Fascist world might do.

Wives, youngsters, husbands, all with a tattoo
Unless it was decreed that they should die –
Shuffling towards the showers in a queue.

All their tomorrows up some Nazi flue.
And still men jib at facts, and would deny
That millions walked into the shower’s adieu.

Those cattle trucks from Europe thundered through
Whole towns where no-one heard each ghetto’s cry
The moral compass shattered, all askew.

Go visit Auschwitz.
Learn that this is true,
Feel the despair of those who here passed by
Vast evil out of racial hatred grew,
Live for today, but give the dead their due.

sheena blackhall

A self-portrait, composed by one of the greatest monsters of all time: Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant at Auschwitz, and the man who knew more than almost anyone about how Nazi Germany implemented the Final Solution. Captured by the British after the war, tried, and sentenced to death, he was ordered to write his autobiography in the weeks between his trial and his execution (which fittingly took place in Auschwitz itself). Hoess apparently enjoyed the task, and the most careful checking by researchers showed he took great pains to tell the truth. The result: a vivid and unforgettable picture of the 20th century’s defining and most horrific event. Royalties from this book go to the fund to help the few survivors of Auschwitz.