Auschwitz: A History

Author: Sybille Steinbacher
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Penguin UK, 2005
Pages: 176
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: At the terrible heart of the modern age lies Auschwitz. In a total inversion of earlier hopes about the of science and technology to improve, extend and protect human life, Auschwitz manipulated the same systems to quite different ends. 

The reader is led through the process by which something unthinkable to any European in the 1930s had become a sprawling, industrial reality during the course of the world war. How Auschwitz grew and mutate into an entire dreadful city, how both those who managed it and those who were killed by it came to be in Poland in the 1940s, and how it was allowed to happen, is something everyone needs to understand.

Review: Some chapters were more interesting than others. This was a little dry in parts, but I hadn't given much thought before as to how (or why) Auschwitz came to be a death camp.