You asked about the issue of putting perpetrators on trial this late—but not too late—that Germany mounted. That really came about as a result of a change in the law that took effect with the conviction of John Demjanjuk in 2011 (when the former concentration camp guard was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for acting as an accessory to murder, although he died while his appeal was still pending). The effect was to establish that working in a place, the primary purpose of which was putting people to death, was by itself sufficient to prove that individual to be an accessory to murder. Had they done that in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, we could have put a vast number of perpetrators on trial, but they didn’t. The Factories of Death chapter describes the rapid ramp up of the killing capacities towards the end of 1943 and early 1944 as well as the fate of the 69000 French Jews (the 3rd largest number of murders committed during the Holocaust at Auschwitz after the Hungarians (~450k) and the Poles (300k)) and as someone living in France, this was particularly difficult to read for me. Toivi Blatt, a boy sent to Sobibor (a death camp) and spared so he could assist in the killing process by cutting hair, sorting clothes, taking baggage and cleaning camps. That the Germans killed so many people like 10,000 per day. This coined the term Death Factories. It is really barbaric and I could not put down the book and sleep at the height of anger. I ended up light headed in the office for a couple of days because of few hours of sleep.

Let’s move on to sociologist Gerhard Durlacher’s The Search: The Birkenau Boys. He was a child during Auschwitz and wrote this book in the 1980s. It’s a search for the other boys who were taken there with him, right? One of the things I found difficult about choosing books that are still in print is that many don’t convey the experiences of those who never wrote—those who were much less successful, or less literate, or didn’t have the means or the wherewithal to publish.Yes, it’s a good read. I think it’s an important read. What it also brings out well is the public reactions to, and the wider significance of, the Auschwitz trial. We’ve made a big deal of it and that’s in part because there was massive media coverage, largely because of the way Fritz Bauer mounted the trial. Bauer was determined to ensure there was media coverage. He was determined to ensure that victims and survivors were brought from all around the world to give evidence, a bit like the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Laurence Rees με σεβασμό, ευαισθησία, αμεροληψία, εντιμότητα και έχοντας κάνει μια άρτια επιστημονική έρευνα, αναλύει ένα από τα πιο ειδεχθή εγκλήματα της ανθρωπότητας, μια μάυρη κηλίδα της ανθρώπινης ιστορίας.

The book was written by the producer of many BBC documentaries, interviewing many many individuals some of which were written about in the book. Let’s move on to the one history book you’ve chosen, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-65 by Devin O Pendas. We’ve talked about this already a bit, but can you tell me how the trial came about? How was it received and what were the “limits of the law” mentioned in the subtitle? One of the most disturbing aspects of this analysis is, in my experience, that it is one shared by many perpetrators. I remember one former dedicated member of the Nazi party saying to me in an exasperated manner, after I pressed him on why so many went along with the horrors of the regimes, "The trouble with the world today is that people who have never been tested go around making judgments about people who have."First and foremost, the forces that drove the Holocaust aren't so different from the forces that caused other atrocities throughout the world's history and the Germans aren't the only ones who have something to apologize for. Finally, let’s move on to Marie Jalowicz-Simon’s Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany. I’d never heard of her, but this is probably the most extraordinary story of all the ones that you’ve mentioned. Tell us about it. In the early years, people were actually not that interested in what survivors had experienced; they were only of interest as witnesses to the crimes of others, not as testimonies to what the past had done to them” I have always fancied myself an amateur World War II historian. I have been fascinated with that war since I was a child and my grandfather, a WWII veteran himself, would sit me down as a kid and willingly tell me stories about his time in the Pacific. But despite my fascination with the war itself, it was the Holocaust that I gravitated toward. The sadness, torture, horror, and unbelievable loss of life during the Holocaust is something I can never understand. To think something so outrageous could have happened only seventy plus years ago is surreal.

For somebody surviving in hiding, it could be absolutely, terrifyingly difficult, but if you had the fortune to survive, you probably had a sense of a coherent self afterwards, in contrast to the experience Delbo describes of this sharp break with the past. Indeed, if there is one general takeaway from this history, it is that only the most strong-willed of individuals can rise above their moral climate. Most people (and I am thinking of perpetrators, not victims here) simply go along with prevailing attitudes. There were plenty of ideologically committed Nazis, such as Höss; and there were probably many Groenings, who just wanted a stable job. But there is no record of a single SS officer deserting or refusing to serve at Auschwitz on moral grounds. Indeed, the most disturbing thing of all is that, without exception, none of the former perpetrators interviewed by Rees feel much, if any, remorse. Groening was finally motivated to speak about his experiences, in his old age, not because of lingering guilt, but because he encountered some Holocaust deniers (he wanted to assure them that it was real). We actually don’t know how many people helped victims of persecution. If you think of an account like this, Marie Jalowicz-Simon was helped by numerous people. And many of these stories of people who went underground— untergetaucht is the German word they use; some called themselves ‘ U-Boote’ or ‘submarines’—show that you could generally only stay with any given person or in any given place for a short period of time and then you had to move on. Yes. It’s an interesting contrast to Delbo. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He spent very little time in Auschwitz; in fact, he was in Theresienstadt, the supposed ‘model ghetto’ for the Red Cross inspection. Then he was deported to Auschwitz where he spent only a short period of time because he was selected for labour. He spent most of the rest of the war in a sub-camp of Dachau in Bavaria.I think this book should be essential reading for all, especially if one is interested in learning more about The Holocaust. Durlacher, like Otto Dov Kulka, talks about seeing the American airplanes flying across the blue skies above Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 . . . both boys saw them almost like little toys in the air” Judged purely as a history, this book is good but not superlative. Rees does an admirable job of covering the broad sweep of the camp’s history, including many unexpected (and usually quite disturbing) details. However, the book’s brevity precludes any detailed examination, and I was often left wanting to learn more about certain aspects of the camp. Curiously, Rees also includes many stories that are outside the purported purview of the book—such as the story of how the citizens of Britain’s Channel Islands reacted to the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews—stories that are usually quite compelling, but which seem difficult to justify including in a book of this size.