Review: Very short, concise overview of Auschwitz and Nazi Germany
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 26, 2014
AUSCHWITZ The Shocking Story & Secrets of the Holocaust Death Camp is a concise history explaining why the memory of Auschwitz matters.  With forty five sub-camps, Auschwitz was the largest of the camps and had areas where the victims lived, worked, and died.  It tells the numbers of people who died in some of the more famous camps and includes numbers for both Jews and other groups: 1.5 million Jews died at Auschwitz, half by overwork, starvation, and work conditions.  Ten thousand prisoners of other groups were also imprisoned there, many of whom also died.It begins with the actions taken by the Nazis leading to the construction of the death camps and discusses what life was like in the camp including working and living conditions, food, medical experiments, methods of killing and torture.According to Larry Berg, “In 2007 UNESCO renamed the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum a ‘German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp’ in order to stress that the camp was run by the Germans and not the Poles.”  I find this misleading because it would not have been able to operate without the cooperation of the Polish citizens who worked there, saw (or smelled or heard) what was going, and assisted in the capture and deaths of 3,000,000 Polish Jews.The book does provide an augmented outline of Auschwitz and is written in a easy-to-comprehend manner, understandable to secondary school children.  There is not much information there that is not available through many other sources.This book was a free Amazon download.