Customer Reviews

Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell

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Well written account of Lieutenant Marcus J. Smith, an Army Doctor who with 9 others was sent to form Displaced Persons Team # 115, to Dachau after liberation. How Lt. Smith who had his medical training in radiology was unprepared for what was waiting for him and his team at Dachau. The book follows his assignment for 6 weeks at Dachau, now a dispaced persons camp. A good book for those interested in Dachau after liberation.

I knew the author of this book, Marcus Smith, in his later life, when he was a radiologist in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was a gentle, thoughtful, and open minded physician, and a very good radiologist.

I read this book when it first came out, and it opened my eyes to the true horror of the death camps in Germany during the Second World War. The careful description of the camps, the prisoners, and the medical team that first came upon them is stark, moving, and essential to understanding what happened. The newsreel footage conveys only a small piece of what the medical teams found there.

The Harrowing of Hell is wellnamed. It's not hard to read, like many books about the Holocaust. We have much more detailed information from other sources, but this book tells the story like no other, on the front lines, in the first person, and as it happened.

You wouldn't have thought it was possible for a book about such a serious, important subject, to be so bland, but I am afraid the most harrowing thing about reading this is the dull prose of this book, written as if by a school student for a teacher they wanted to impress. There are many better books about the nightmare of Dachau. Don't waste your time on this badly written piece of literature.