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Just found a review for “Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution” by Laurence Rees, BBC Books (!!).

The reviewer, a history professor by the name of Eli Shaltiel, tells us that the book offers an excellent, thorough and readable “synthesis” of the information available from these past decades of research:

This terse and highly readable book thus incorporates the conclusions and findings of many in-depth and important studies, and touches on all the issues that have been preoccupying Holocaust researchers in recent years. The book traces the establishment of the camp and offers a detailed account of what went on there, month after month, year after year.

But Rees, a documentary film director for the BBC, didn’t just stop there. He investigates deeper into the causes and parties involved in the Final Solution and does so with an eye to commonplace arguments by pro-Nazi sources that have come to dominate parts of the debate over recent years.

The book offers, for example, a very concentrated and credible history of the origins of the Final Solution and how it was set in motion. Rees discusses the role of the famous Wannsee Conference in implementing the decision to methodically destroy all the European Jews the Nazis could get their hands on. He writes about how the Germans came up with the idea of gas chambers, dates their first use, and cites comparisons of the number of Jews killed this way as opposed to other methods. He delves into why Auschwitz became a symbol of mass murder, although it was not built as a concentration camp and the killings were even more systematic and barbaric in other death camps.

More and more over the past few years, the murderous passions of Hitler and his henchmen have been attributed to the Nazis’ belief that their war on the Jews was a life-and-death struggle to save the Aryan race. Some researchers claim there is proof of this in Hitler’s speeches. Indeed, this attempt to identify the motive for the Final Solution helps to illuminate certain problematic issues that researchers were hard pressed to explain until now. The eminent Holocaust scholar Saul Friedlander, for example, is one of the proponents of this approach. Rees presents these ideas and tries to clarify them for us. In this respect, his book deals not just with history, but with today’s perceptions of it. The claims of Holocaust deniers are addressed as well.

Being the media man he is, Rees turns to witnesses and oral testimony. Many of the people he interviews tell stories that are familiar to us, if not in the details then in the general message they convey. A case in point is the shocking testimony of the Zondercommandos who worked in the Auschwitz crematoria. But there are surprises, too, like the testimony of a former SS officer who served in Auschwitz for a number of years – and now, in his eighties, after a high-profile career in post-war Germany, has no qualms about remembering those days and explaining his actions. He has no regrets and does not feel any need to ask for forgiveness. Everything the man did in Auschwitz and the SS was part of the war on the Jews, who were out to destroy the Aryan race. In war, as in war, as they say. Today he is prepared to admit that it is quite likely there was no real basis for this war theory. But during his military service, he fully believed it, and did his duty as a soldier to defend his people and wipe out those who posed a threat to it.

I plan to buy it when it becomes available in the US. Currently, it is possible to purchase the book as well as the lengthy and apparently excellent accompanying documentary film in the UK.

About the author

themiddle

4 Comments

  • There’s lots of newer perspectives coming out. But a comprehensive approach is always useful. If you know the history, the development of the NS party, and took their rhetoric seriously, you’d come away with the thought that it could not only happen again, but that on a smaller scale, it’s been happening all over the damn place with increasing frequency. This is not to doubt or question the uniqueness of the Holocaust, but the genesis of it’s development was & remains pure politics in the most basic & tragically twisted sense. The search for convenient scapegoats that the failures of the nation & the economy can be blamed on. The manufacture of special crimes and special offenses for these despised categories of people. The manufacture and cultivation of official state enemies for the state to control, oversee, and sanction. The regular, wholesale and constant incitement to hatred & violence in the mass media as part and parcel of this, and of a political party platform in order to ‘divide & conquer’ all opposition. The essential control over the entire apparatus of the state that can brook or tolerate no dissent. When finally the integration of state terror and violence comes, it is not only bureaucratized for efficiency, but normalized, and pervasive. The entire German state was organized for these perverse goals. It’s reach was breathtaking in it’s extent, depth, and scope. When these goals conflicted with the effective prosecution of the war, it was the mass extermination program that often won out. We pray that we’ll never see it’s like again on this earth, but essential elements of this demonic system of thought remain with us in almost every political system today. Cheers, ‘VJ’

  • Thomas Sowell, in Civil Rights–Rhetoric and Reality– draws a comparison between Jewish Culture and Chinese Culture. His argument is that culture creates wealth– and those cultures that value both education and entrepreneurship do the best economically.

    He posits the theory that Chinese ex pats in places like Indonesia, who are often also Christians, are persecuted for preceisely the same reasons as the Jews in European culture– they are more economically successful in general than other persons. Rather than see that the reason has nothing to do with “jews sticking together” (after all — any group of people can “stick together”– he argues that Jews are culturally different from other Europeans and in significant ways– two of which involve willingness to take the risk to start a business and willingness to work hard to get an education.

    Much of the barbarism we see in the world has that simple envy underneath it. Look at what happened in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge put anyone who wore glasses to death or in a forced labor camp.

  • Woooow, more crap from a Jew rat wanna be historian about the Holyhoax