Output details

A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust

This book explores Nazi racial policies in the Landkreis (county) of Będzin, situated 25 miles from Auschwitz, in an area annexed by Germany in 1939. It focuses on the principal civilian administrator (Landrat), and the thousands of Jews who were ghettoised, deported and murdered. It confronts ambiguous memories and later self-representations with the evidence of the time, using a wide array of sources: letters, oral history interviews, personal testimonies, and sources from numerous archives across Germany and Poland. There are also close personal connections; it required considerable rethinking not only of arguments about the Holocaust, but also of historical subjectivity.