Auschwitz, 1270 to the PresentW. W. Norton & Company, 1996 - 443 pages 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 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. |
Contents
Introduction | 9 |
Part | 15 |
NOSTALGIA AND FULFILLMENT CHAPTER 1 An Ordinary Town | 17 |
The Prussian Connection | 38 |
Germanys Turn to the East | 66 |
The Third Reich | 92 |
A Paradise of Blood and Soil | 127 |
Part Two AMBITION AND PERDITION | 161 |
Birkenau | 236 |
Summer 1941 | 276 |
The Holocaust | 307 |
EPILOGUE Owning and Disowning Auschwitz | 354 |
Acknowledgments | 379 |
Notes | 383 |
423 | |
425 | |
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Common terms and phrases
agricultural annexed territories architects Archive army Auschwitz Auschwitz-Birkenau Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Authors Baltic Balts barracks became Berlin Birkenau Bischoff box BW building coll concentration camp construction corpses Cracow crematorium death delousing deported deutsche deutschen duchy Dwork eastern Eichmann Einsatzgruppen ethnic Germans extermination farms file BW Führer gas chamber Generalplan Ost German East German Nation German settlement ghetto Göring Greifelt Heinrich Himmler Heydrich Himmler Hindenburg Hitler Holocaust Höss Ibid IG Farben incineration industrial inmates Jan van Pelt January Jewish Jews Kammler killed Kommandantur labor land Lublin main camp March microfilm RG million National Socialist Office Oswiecim plate PMOB Poland Poles Polish political population Posen province Prussia quoted reconstruction reel Reich Commissioner Reichsführer-SS resettlement Robert Jan Rudolf Höss Russian Sterling Memorial Library Stosberg tion Topf trans transport Upper Silesia urban USHRI villages Vistula West Prussia workers Yale University Zyklon