Auschwitz

A history of the Auschwitz camps against the background of Nazi policies in the occupied areas and the Final Solution, based largely on interviews with Nazi perpetrators and former prisoners, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Auschwitz was not initially conceived as a camp for the mass killing of Jews. Its first inmates were Polish political prisoners, later joined by Soviet POWs. The escalation of Germany's war and genocide furthered Auschwitz's transformation to a site of mass murder. Argues that a crucial precondition for this change was the mentality of the camp's commandant, Rudolf Höss. Initiatives of the mid-level echelon of the SS played a decisive role in the shaping of the Final Solution machinery, including at Auschwitz. The murder capacity of Auschwitz grew from the end of 1941, when the first killing facilities were established there, to 1944, when it became the main focus of the Holocaust after the German occupation of Hungary. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)