Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp

This is an authoritative account of the operation of the Auschwitz death camp. "...a comprehensive work that is unlikely to be overtaken for many years. This learned volume is about as chilling as historiography gets." - Walter Laqueur, "The New Republic". "...a vital contribution to Holocaust studies and a bulwark against forgetting." - "Publishers Weekly". "Rigorously documented, brilliantly written, organized, and edited ...the most authoritative book about a place of unsurpassed importance in human history." - John K. Roth. "Never before has knowledge concerning every aspect of Auschwitz ...been made available in such authority, depth, and comprehensiveness." - Richard L. Rubenstein. Leading scholars from the United States, Israel, Poland, and other European countries provide the first comprehensive account of what took place at the Auschwitz death camp. Principal sections of the book address the institutional history of the camp, the technology and dimensions of the genocide carried out there, the profiles of the perpetrators and the lives of the inmates, underground resistance and escapes, and what the outside world knew about Auschwitz and when. It is published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

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