More than 60 years after the end of the Nazi regime, the crimes against humanity committed during the Holocaust continue to evoke horror and disgust among most civilized people. As a result, interest in the Holocaust and related topics continues unabated, throughout the United States and Europe. Even if we discount memoirs by survivors (which is not wise, considering the number of new memoirs being published annually), the literature is vast and still growing. According to a recent count, the New York Public Library holds 150 books on concentration camps published in English since 1992 (the latest date of material included in the final supplement of my Bibliography on Holocaust Literature). The amount of material exclusively focused on the camps, limited only to English, totals more than 500 items. If these figures are added to materials in languages other than English — especially Polish and German — the grand total could be well over 20,000 items. It is noteworthy that 30 years ago, historian M.R.D Foot claimed the total was over 7,000 for the Auschwitz camp alone.
This bibliographic introduction is provided as a way to judge some of the more recent and historically significant literature on the Nazi Concentration Camps, a terror system that included well over 3,000 different camps. It must be understood that each camp was unique, even though all shared some common characteristics. Even the least satisfactory book on the subject may have a unique insight on specific camps or on the concentration camp system as a whole.
Within the large pool of literature on the Holocaust, I rate Paul Martin Neurath’s The Society of Terror as a must-read. Neurath, an Austrian Jewish Social Democrat, spent most of the period between the Anschluss of Germany and Austria (March, 1938 and 1941) behind the barbed wire fences of Dachau and Buchenwald. Both sites were pure concentration camps — in other words, camps in which political prisoners were held and worked to death. The text, composed from memory while in exile in Sweden in 1941, formed the basis for Neurath’s dissertation in Sociology at Columbia University. He went on to a distinguished teaching career, which continued until his death on September 3, 2001.
The book compares well with other early texts on the camps, notably with Christopher Burney’s The Dungeon Democracy, which describes Buchenwald from the perspective of an interned Briton. Both books deal extensively with the social stratification amongst the prisoners, such as the “superiority” of a criminal (socalled Green, from the color of the triangle that the Nazis assigned inmates based on their “crime) over a Communist (Red), the superiority of a Communist over an Asocial (Black) or a Jehova’s Witness (Violet), and teh superiority of both of those over a Jew (Yellow), Gypsy (Brown), or Homosexual (Pink). Both books explain the use of terror and violence by the SS as a means of demoralizing and dehumanizing. Neurath’s book is more clinical and thus, perhaps, more reliable from a historical point of view, but both books agree on most points of analysis.
Despite the academic background of Neurath’s book, it is relatively easy reading, assuming one has a strong constitution. The text is free of jargon and uses none of the expected psychological or sociological terminology. A careful reader will clearly come away with a better understanding of both the internal and external structure of the camps and how they functioned within the context of the Nazi totalitarian state.
Sybille Steinbacher’s Auschwitz: A History is a more terse and spare historian’s account of the Auschwitz concentration/slave labor/murder camp. Again a number of similar books already exist, but this one fills a niche: it is a short primer on the history of Auschwitz in all its manifestations written (originally for a German audience) to debunk the lies of Holocaust deniers such as Robert Faurisson and David Irving. Even with such a limited purpose, the book manages to enlighten. The author discusses the development of Auschwitz as a German civilian settlement, mainly inhabited by camp overseers and technicians, in the attached factories of the I. G. Farben Verlag, which reached a population of 6,000 by 1943.
There are two minor drawbacks. First, for a volume written to set the record straight, there are no source references and only a limited (52 items) bibliography. There is no citation of primary sources, at least none whose provenance can be specifically tracked down, and no critical sense of which sources are more useful and which are less useful. Second, as the book was originally written in German, the flow of the English used isn’t as smooth as that of other books. I had to reread a number of passages before completely understanding their full meaning and ramifications. I still recommend the book, especially to readers looking for a short overview. However, if you are looking for detail and careful documentation, then look elsewhere.
A substantially different look at the concentration camps is provided by Ben Shephard’s After Daybreak. In recounting the liberation of Bergen Belsen by the Royal Army on April 12, 1945, he attempts to demystify those first weeks of freedom. Shephard’s point of departure is the fact that 14,000 of the almost 60,000 inmates freed when the camp was captured by the British died within two weeks of liberation. That is an astounding 24% of the inmates liberated. Most historical accounts focus on post-liberation deaths as the dire result of Nazi persecution, mainly malnutrition, that derived from the Nazi policy of “vernichtung durch arbeit” (extermination through labor). While Shephard does not deny the significance of this factor, he also notes the crucial errors made by Allied forces immediately after the liberation.
Using a panoply of published and herertofore untapped oral sources — mainly reports by liberating soldiers and medical personnel stationed in Belsen in those first few weeks — Shephard is able to reconstruct virtually every decision, both good and bad, made by the Allied forces controlling the camp. The sad but true reality is that Allied policy of keeping German war crimes a virtual secret left military personnel with neither sufficient understanding nor sufficient resources to deal with the mass medical problems that were bound to occur upon liberation. It might also be noted that losses at Belsen compare favorably with losses at other camps: approximately 40% (each) of the liberated inmates at Buchenwald and Dachau, which were liberated by the U.S. Army at the same time, died. This was not a matter of the British being uncaring or inept, but, as noted, the direct consequence of the policies espoused by the senior Allied military and political leadership. Indeed, on balance, the British come off quite well in Shephard’s account of the liberation. Perhaps not as well as the Americans, but certainly better then the French or the Russians. Some of the negativity in regard to the British may derive from post-liberation policies, when the status of the former Jewish concentration camp inmates, referred to as Displaced Persons, became enmeshed with the issue of Palestine/Eretz Israel.
It is interesting to see how authors view the camps 60 years after the end of the Holocaust. All three of the books reviewed here bring fresh new perspectives to the subject matter and thus allow us to assess the continuing importance of Holocaust studies, in the Western World. The question remains, however, whether or not this continuing interest in the Holocaust can be transformed into action against continuing acts of genocide and mass hatred.
