Hundreds of thousands of people from all continents visit Dachau Memorial Site each year. Any visitor to the Memorial Site will find that the Memorial Site bookshop stocks two publications worthy of particular mention, both deal at length with the history of the former concentration camp; Stanislav Zamecnik's ,outstanding, That Was Dachau and the superb Catalogue for the Exhibition: The Dachau Concentration Camp edited by Barbara Distel. Notwithstanding, there is little, recently written a...

"A chilling study of the . . . recruitment, indoctrination and performance of those responsible for the guarding of concentration camp inmates."—Inscale.orgThe conversion of human beings into murderers and individuals routinely carrying out appalling acts of cruelty are bound to be shocking. But it happened under the Third Reich on a massive scale.This book follows the development of concentration camps from the early beginnings in the 1930s (Buchenwald, Sa...

Fifteen-year-old Hanna Berkenski journeys from her family's tiny apartment in the Warsaw Ghetto through an awful night spent in a cattle-car with her mother and sister to the welcoming orchestra at Auschwitz where she was to be a violinist for three years.As the train arrives at Auschwitz, flowers, sunshine and music feel like warm welcomes to her. She's been told she'll be spending the next few weeks in a "work camp" until her family can be reunited and relocated. Even the snowfla...

During a 1931 trial of four Nazi stormtroopers, known as the Eden Dance Palace trial, Hans Litten grilled Hitler in a brilliant and merciless three-hour cross-examination, forcing him into multiple contradictions and evasions and finally reducing him to helpless and humiliating rage (the transcription of Hitler's full testimony is included.) At the time, Hitler was still trying to prove his embrace of legal methods, and distancing himself from his stormtroopers. The courageous Litten revea...

Barbara Cherish's upbringing in Nazi-occupied Poland was one of relative wealth and comfort. But her father's senior position in the Nazi Party meant that she and her brothers and sisters lived on a knife edge. In 1943 he became commandant of perhaps the most infamous of all the concentration camps: Auschwitz.The author tells her father's story with clarity and without judgement, detailing his relationship with his family and his unceasing love for his mistress, as...

From its creation in 1933 until Hitler's death in May 1945, anyone living in Nazi-controlled territory lived in fear of a visit from the Gestapo an abbreviation of Geheime Staatspolizei or secret state police. Young or old, rich or poor, nobody was beyond the attentions of a brutally efficient organization that spread its malign influence into every corner of Europe in the wake of the all-conquering German armed forces. The Gestapo offers a detailed history of this evil operation commanded...

This is a unique, eye-witness account of everyday life right at the heart of the Nazi extermination machine.Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first with disbelief, that they had almost certainly been gassed. Given the chance to earn a l...

'Agnès Humbert bears devastating witness to her time ... An insider's account of the germination of the French Resistance' William Boyd'Sober and testifying, sardonic and humorous ... A beautiful and powerful work of literature' The TimesIn the summer of 1940, as the German Occupation tightened its grip on Paris, Agnès Humbert helped to establish one of the first resistance cells. She had no experience in warfare: she was an art hi...

SADISTS?OF?THE?RISING?SUN focuses on the unique cruelty and capacity for slaughter displayed by Japan, from the beginning of the 1930s, with the origins of its atrocity-focused incursions into East Asia, until the devastation of its cities and incineration of its population by firestorms in 1945. During that period, Japan determinedly undertook the twentieth-century’s supreme mission of Imperially-sanctioned butchery, combining the bacteriological obliteration of entire cities with the c...

He evaded death so many times it seemed it would never take him. The only man in history to go to Auschwitz as a volunteer, to form a resistance movement and document German atrocities. One of the few who succeeded in escaping. He sent drawings from there to his children and wrote letters to his wife, delivering them via the underground conspiracy along with reports. The British historian Michael Foot included him among the six most courageous people of the Second World War. After the war ...

The testament to a tragedy.Voices from The Holocaust follows the whole history of the 'Shoah' from Hitler's rise to power to the Nuremburg trials, but of course the exterminations and death camps of 'The Final Solution' take centre stage. It tells the story from the perspective of the people who were there, and were witnesses - on both sides - of the horror.While some of the eye-witnesses are well-known, such as Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Heinrich Himmler, the book...

While sitting in traffic heading to her great-grandfather's eighty-fourth birthday party, Hayden asks her dad why her great-grandfather speaks the way he does. What follows is a car ride she will never forget as she learns about his difficult childhood.From living in the Lodz ghetto at age ten to surviving the hells of Auschwitz and a death march from Görlitz concentration camp at fifteen, Teddy Znamirowski faced unfathomable horrors, narrowly escaping death time and time again. Lib...