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Against all Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps

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Herman Langbein is one of the best known Auschwitz historians, and this book chronicles, in painstaking detail, acts of resistance and defiance that took place in the nazi concentration camps. The book recounts simple acts of humanity between prisoners, far reaching acts of organised resistance (for example using the nazi's obsession with bureaucracy - people selected for extermination were saved by altering forms), to open acts of insurrection towards the end of the war.

Langbein, himself a key member of Combat Group Auschwitz, uses all the rigour and objectivity we expect of the serious historian. The book is an important contribution in these days when those who survived to bear witness are fewer and where the accounts by important witnesses such as Filip Muller, Hans Marsalek and Eugen Kogon, are out of print.

This book is especially important as evidence to counter the Holocaust denialists, and those who condemned Jewish and other people for "acting like sheep".

While some endure and hope for the best, there were those who fought. "Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps: 1938-1945" tells the story of the Jews who resisted their oppressors even in hopeless situations where they were unarmed against the German forces holding them captive. Hermann Langbein tells his own story of standing up in the final days of the war in the notorious camp of Auschwitz, and how he and others he knew made their stand even in hopeless situations. "Against All Hope" is a fascinating and uplifting read that shouldn't be missed by history readers.

This book would make an excellent resource for the holocaust student who is writing a thesis or book on this topic. For the casual reader, it is very dry and full of unconnected details. One gets almost no sense of the actual horror of those camps. Those unfamiliar with the camps might come away believing that they were no worse than the average POW camp or Gulag. For example, we get no idea of what it means to be consigned to "the bunker". He writes positively about Wilhelm Boger without mentioning how he horrifically tortured so many prisoners in the Political Section in Auschwitz, for which he received a life sentence in 1960.