Auschwitz: 1270 To the Present [Paperback]

Deborah Dwork (Author), Robert Jan Van Pelt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1997

No symbol of the Holocaust is more profound than Auschwitz. How could such an ordinary town become a site of such terror? Who conceived, created, and constructed the camp? This unprecedented history reveals how an unremarkable Polish village was transformed into a killing field. 200 photos & architectural plans.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Founded by Germans in 1270 and sold to Polish King Casimir IV in 1457, the small provincial town of Auschwitz (Oswiecim in Polish) became a pawn in power struggles between Poland, Germany, Bohemia and Hungary. When Hitler annexed this border town to the Reich in 1939 as German troops smashed Poland, the Nazis celebrated their push to reclaim the "German East," a mythologized, racially pure domain once contested by medieval knights of the Teutonic Order, who ruled Prussia in the 13th century after virtually exterminating the native population and repopulating the town with Germans. The concentration camp established in Auschwitz's suburbs in 1940-designed as a transit camp for Poles being shipped west as slave laborers-was soon transformed into an extermination camp for killing Jews. Using 224 photographs and architectural plans, as well as oral histories of survivors, this careful, detached study traces the camp's evolution into a site where more than one million people were killed and through January 1945, when the remaining 60,000 prisoners underwent a forced march into Germany. Dwork is a professor of Holocaust studies at Clark University in Mass.; van Pelt a cultural history professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Dwork (Children with a Star, LJ 2/15/91) and Pelt (cultural history, Univ. of Waterloo) have written a striking and unusual book. Auschwitz is infamous because it was the largest of the Nazi extermination camps, but Dwork and Pelt delve into its pre-Nazi past to show how it served as a key site for other reasons. Auschwitz (in Polish, Oswiecim), an eastern border town, became a symbol of the German myth of a bucolic medieval past full of achievement. The authors examine how a tourist town of lovely castles became a killing center, and they trace the anti-Semitic ideology that gave rise to the horrible crimes committed there. The text includes survivor testimonies, Nazi propaganda photographs, and extensive architectural blueprints of the camp complex found in the last days of the war. An epilog explains how Auschwitz came to be perceived by different peoples. Recommended for academic and public libraries with strong collections in Holocaust studies.?Paul Kaplan, Lake Villa Dist. Lib., Ill.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 472 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc (November 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039331684X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393316841
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,619,255 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Insightful use of architectural records, July 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Auschwitz: 1270 To the Present (Paperback)

This book skillfully combines a history of German influence in the East with a detailed look at the death and labor camps of Auschwitz. Using the architectural records left behind as well as statements of people who were there to outline the story, the authors trace the development and changes of the Auschwitz camps from 1939 to the present day. The skillful use of architectural plans provides insight into the changing purposes the camp adapted to in its short but terrible life. Also, the authors trace the German influence in the area back to the founding of the town in 1270 and relate the camp's shifting purpose to the territorial goals of the Germans in the East both before and during the war.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Auschwitz Itself: A Good Historical Overview of German Ospolitik, December 3, 2008

By 

Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present: A History (Hardcover)

Instead of repeating other reviewers, let's focus on undeveloped content. To begin with, it is interesting to note that the post-WWII Odra-Nysa (Oder-Neisse) boundary coincided with the east-most deployment of Germans before the year 1200 A.D. (p. 24).

"Nationalism" nowadays is often a dirty word. In actuality, there are different kinds of nationalism, only some of which are repulsive. While discussing the 19th-century German rule over western Poles, Dwork and van Pelt comment: "What had been a domain of encounter became a battlefield where the imperial and integral nationalism of the Germans faced the functional and emancipatory nationalism of the Poles." (p. 48).

Contrary to those who misrepresent the Germans as voting Hitler into power merely in order to avenge and rectify the "injustices" of Versailles, the authors recognize the fact that Hitler plainly wrote in MEIN KAMPF about his plans for a massive war for lebensraum against the Slavic east. What's more, this was not only well known to Germans in general, but enthusiastically supported by them. (pp. 82-83). (While it is technically true that Hitler didn't win an absolute majority, it begs the question why the Nationalist and Catholic deputies deliberately chose to push him over the top (p. 96), giving him totalitarian rule.)

Dwork and van Pelt realize that the Auschwitz camp was created for Poles. (p. 168, 173, 181). Its conversion into an extermination camp for Jews came much later. Nor was the latter a foregone conclusion. In fact, the Final Solution first envisioned the mass resettlement of Europe's Jews to the Lublin-area, then Madagascar, then to German-ruled Russia--the latter similar to the planned eastward mass-resettlement of Poles (Generalplan Ost). The decision to systematically exterminate the Jews was made only after the Red Army had failed to collapse as expected, and the region for planned resettlement of Jews remained under Soviet control. (p. 287, 293).

Much has been said (e. g., by Jan T. Gross) about Polish "greed" in acquiring post-Jewish properties, and Polish hostility to Jewish survivors showing up to reclaim their properties. Inadvertently, the authors correct these misconceptions while discussing postwar Auschwitz: "Practical and theoretical considerations prompted the severance of the stucco barracks from the memorial camp. THERE WAS A CRIPPLING LACK OF HOUSING IN POLAND IN 1945, and these structures were spacious, well-built, intact, and available for immediate occupancy." (p. 360; emphasis added).

The authors touch on the postwar history of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and, while discussing the controversy about the Carmelite convent and the crosses, they refer to the Christian symbols as expressing triumphalism over the Jewish victims. Using the same reasoning, shouldn't the Stars of David be considered a form of triumphalism over the Christian victims of this camp?

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Auschwitz, an ordinary town?, April 5, 2004

By 

Michelle Baldesweiler (St. John's Universtiy, Queens NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Auschwitz: 1270 To the Present (Paperback)

I felt that this book was an extremely interesting book that gave a different view on the transformation of the Polish town Auscwitz. The book explains how it was once an ordinary town that soon became one of the leading concentration camps in the Nazi era. The book explains the different stages the town went through from 1270 to the present. It was once a small Polish town, then a production site for gravel and sand, later an execution site, a place where Himmler wanted to build a farm communities, and then the answer to the "Jewish" question.
What I liked about this book was that it gave a mass amount of illustrations, ranging from pictures to graphs to building plans. This book also had some eye witness accounts from the view of the Jewish survivals, explaining what their feelings and reactions were during this time. The book is broken into two parts: Nostalgia and Fullfillment and Ambition and Perdition. The first part explains the history of the town and the second part starts off with the concentration camp. The Epilogue, "Owning and Disowning Auschwitz" I thought gave a quick and interesting view on the town today and what happend to it after the fall of the Nazi's. It briefly explains the problmes that arose afterwards and the concentration camp today.
After giving the history of Auschwitz,the authors end with a question that still haunts the Jewish people today, Why?