NAZI DEATH CAMPS: THEN AND NOW

At the outbreak of the Second World War there were six 'concentration camps' in Germany, holding around 20,000 prisoners, but during the following six years the number of camps grew to over 15,000 with six purpose-built killing centres operating a production line of extermination under Operation 'Reinhard', more popularly known as the 'Final Solution'. Himmler, the Police President of Munich, lost no time in establishing the first formal concentration camp in an old gunpowder factory outside the city at Dachau. Its very name became synonymous with death alongside Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück (exclusively for women) and Belsen. However, hidden away in eastern Poland whose existence was only revealed in 1945, were six more including Auschwitz and Treblinka. A colour map at the introduction orientates us through this hellish number of concentration and labour camps established in the Greater Reich and the occupied countries. Chapters cover Germany, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, France, Holand, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Poland and of course Berlin and even Alderney in the Channel Islands. All are illustrated with comparison photographs which are the forte of this publisher. Some of the camps have been preserved but at others only a memorial stands to mark its passing as we see in the 'Then and Now' colour and archive picture comparisons. We give a warning that there are images of skeletal semi-naked dead bodies piled in heaps and on carts, shallow graves and the bodies of men and women exhumed in villages by the US 4th Armored with a notice affixed to the cross reading 'Here lie 800 murdered bodies killed by the Nazis of Namering (sic) Germany in April 1945.' And gallows and charred bodies on a grill made out of railway lines, previously unreleased photographs from a whipping table with a pile of 40 naked bodies, quarries and prisoners with picks and shovels, maps of the camps and the Valley of Death crematorium, pictures of families and visitors paying their respects in modern times, underground bunkers and discovered buildings. Chapter by chapter, country by country, mugshot by mugshot even colour images of escape attempts such as Sobibor in spring 1943 where camp guards and 11 SS officers were killed, there are grim images of tiny children in striped pyjamas and the furnaces and railway tracks - these images are only for the strong minded. 456 glossy quality images, 21.9 x 30.5cm. Hundreds of colour and other images.