Auschwitz Scholars Examine Auschwitz in Yad Vashem Studies, Volume XXX

Auschwitz Scholars Examine Auschwitz, Review of Auschwitz 1940-1945 – Central Issues in the History of the Camp, Waclaw Dlugoborski and Franciszek Piper, eds., translated from the Polish by William Brand, Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000, 5 vols.

The editors of this five-volume work collected, rearranged, and updated the main results of more than a decade of research by the historians of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The result is a solid, scholarly compendium covering a broad range of issues, from the foundation of the camp until its liberation by the Red Army. Extermination and resistance are treated in separate volumes, based to a great extent on hitherto untapped archival sources. Although the reader will find some aspects of the history of Auschwitz lacking – for instance, the structure of prisoner society, or the interrelations between Auschwitz and the concentration camps in the Reich’s interior – Auschwitz 1940-1945 will remain for years to come an important reference work in the field of Holocaust Studies.