The generation born just after the Second World War would themselves have been young adults then, and they would have had no personal interest in hiding the crimes of the Third Reich. The overwhelming majority of people who had worked at Auschwitz were never brought to court at all” She had to sell sexual favours as a young woman would have to do, and she was fortunate that one old Nazi that she actually managed to stay with was syphilitic and impotent, and therefore unable to avail himself of what she had on offer, but liked having her around. There were ruses she and many others used, with stories about lost papers, about being bombed out, taking on false identities. I think what’s interesting about her account is also that she’s a clever woman. She subsequently goes on to be a distinguished academic in East Germany. Her son, Hermann Simon, got her to record her testimony late in her life. He took down a very long interview with her and wrote it up, and it came out in an extraordinarily articulate way. He said he barely needed to edit it to produce the book. Finally, let’s move on to Marie Jalowicz-Simon’s Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany. I’d never heard of her, but this is probably the most extraordinary story of all the ones that you’ve mentioned. Tell us about it. When it comes to complex topics like the Holocaust, I think it's helpful to read from a number of sources. And often, the best books are those that offer us something new, either by presenting a piece of the puzzle that was missing or perhaps adding additional perspective that affords us a new way of looking at an old piece, allowing us to better place it.

So three extermination camps were constructed, and these are amazingly unfamous – Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. They were specifically for killing, they did not use any prisoners for slave labour, they were located far away from population centres, way out in the Polish countryside. And they were small. They really should be more famous, because they were extremely efficient. That’s one aspect that I think is extraordinary and extremely powerful: this very raw experience, particularly in the first part of the trilogy, which she wrote very soon after the war. The other thing I find fascinating is the way in which she tries to develop a notion of two selves: the disassociation of her post-war self from the Auschwitz-self, a complete disconnect (or attempted disconnect) between the self who experienced and lived through Auschwitz, and the self who survived and was recounting it. That captures what a lot of survivors try to convey in one form or another: this complete caesura in their lives between what they went through and how they live later. Different people deal with it in different ways, and come to terms with it in different ways. The West Germans chose to resort to the old German criminal law; they didn’t want to adopt the Nuremberg principles. They didn’t want anything that was retroactive, punishing crimes that weren’t defined at the time. But the problem with the West German definition of murder was that it entailed showing individual intent and excess brutality. This meant, effectively, that if you couldn’t show that an individual was subjectively motivated to kill, they couldn’t be convicted of murder. There's a huge, huge debate about whether the Allies could have ameliorated the suffering of the Jews by bombing Auschwitz. Books, essays, letters to the editor, this has been going on a while. It's the hectic part of a wider debate about what did the Allies know about the Holocaust and when did they know it. Rees slashes through the nonsense. He says – 1) the Allies knew about the final solution by late 42/early 43; 2) there was nothing they could have done which would have changed anything, either for Auschwitz specifically or anywhere else. But what about this damning quote from Anthony Eden during discussions in Washington in March 1943 about Hungarian Jews (all of whom were later murdered in Auschwitz) – he said it was important It's ironic that as I write this, my boy is watching "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" at school today, as part of their learning about the World War. It makes me sad that he is watching it, as despite being well made, the film is so utterly depressing, but on the other hand, I think he's at the age where he needs to know exactly what humans were capable of.Another issue that I think is really, really important and can’t be emphasized enough is that it wasn’t ‘West Germany’ that decided to put Auschwitz on trial in 1963—it was a few committed individuals and particularly Fritz Bauer, the district attorney of the State of Hessen, who was himself Jewish and a socialist and had to flee into exile to escape Nazi persecution. Hitler and his henchmen were likely a product of their environment. The Germans weren't alone in their anti-semantic policies and the Holocaust couldn't have taken place on the same scale without the complicity of other nations and tens of thousands of individuals who either cooperated with the lunacy (willingly or through coercion) or turned their heads the other way.

Anne Frank was in the hiding while Victor Klemperer was working outside the concentration camp during the Holocaust. This book tells us about the atrocities of the Germany as they implemented "The Final Solution". None of us really knows that monster that lives within us. The "what ifs" are almost impossible to predict. The idea that only innately evil/bad people are capable of doing evil/bad things is naive and simplistic. Beliefs dictate our morality and thus draw the only lines in the sand that matter. It doesn’t make sense to use the individual crime of murder as the basis for prosecution when what you’re dealing with is mass murder, which is part of a system of collective violence.” Laurence Rees με σεβασμό, ευαισθησία, αμεροληψία, εντιμότητα και έχοντας κάνει μια άρτια επιστημονική έρευνα, αναλύει ένα από τα πιο ειδεχθή εγκλήματα της ανθρωπότητας, μια μάυρη κηλίδα της ανθρώπινης ιστορίας.

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By their crime the Nazis brought into the world an awareness of what educated, technologically advanced human beings can do, as long as they possess a cold heart. Once allowed into the world, knowledge of what they did must not be unlearnt. It lies there - ugly, inert, waiting to be rediscovered by each new generation. A warning for us, and for those who will come after. (p. 375)

Rudolf Hoess emphasized in his memoirs how the key to successful mass murder on this scale was to conduct the whole process in an atmosphere of great calm." The idea of a superior race was not exclusive to the Germans. History is replete with examples of cultures who suffer from delusions of supremacy and seem to feel justified in efforts to segregate or "save" the world from the undesirables. I think it's also relevant that at that time in history the idea of eugenics had gained the interest and support of the scientific community. We have many stories of ghettos, but even there, we sometimes see a kind of implicit hierarchy of suffering or heroism. We also have an implicit view of ‘survivor’, meaning someone who survived the camps. But I think we have to try to understand the full range and impact of experiences of Nazi persecution, including for those who managed to get out before the war. Sadly, too few were able to emigrate in time. Auschwitz prisoners were even "sold" to the Bayer company, part of the I.G. Farben, as human guinea pigs for the testing of new drugs. One of the communications from Bayer to the Auschwitz authorities states that "The transport of 150 women arrived in good conditions. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price." My first exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust occurred in the early ‘60s. My sixth-grade teacher—a Holocaust survivor—told us stories about her confinement and even showed us her tattoo to support her story. Later, as a freshman in college, I had a professor of German language who had escaped from one of the Nazi concentration camps. She told us about her experience walking across the Alps to freedom. Since then, I have read a number of history books that have added to my mental picture of these camps, starting with Jean-François Steiner’s book Treblinka in the late ‘60s. Nevertheless, after reading Laurence Rees’s book Auschwitz: A New History, I discovered that there was still much I did not know about the horror of these extermination camps.Lengyel was a surgical assistant in Transylvania when she was deported to Auschwitz; she was able to secure work in an infirmary, a job that ultimately saved her life. This 1946 memoir is an unflinching account of her time in that area, her interactions with Dr. Josef Mengeleand her observations of the medical experiments performed on inmates. A deeply uncomfortable read, Lengyel’s memoir is a necessary living, breathing document. King of the Jews byLeslie Epstein Yes. It’s an interesting contrast to Delbo. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He spent very little time in Auschwitz; in fact, he was in Theresienstadt, the supposed ‘model ghetto’ for the Red Cross inspection. Then he was deported to Auschwitz where he spent only a short period of time because he was selected for labour. He spent most of the rest of the war in a sub-camp of Dachau in Bavaria. The book was written by the producer of many BBC documentaries, interviewing many many individuals some of which were written about in the book.