Through the author's restrained, precise style, combining personal memories and the researcher's scholarly detachment, the reader discovers the many facets of the camp: the hierarchical structure of the camp established and controlled by the SS, the categories of prisoners, their daily life, the arbitrary and escalating violence, the selections, the medical experiments and the role of the SS physicians, the intentional and programmed extermination, the camp's evacuation, the typhus epidemic, and liberation.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains ... "all of the texts and documents in the exhibition."--Page 5.

Marcus Smith was the sole medical officer attached to a small displaced person (DP) team that was sent to the Dachau concentration camp the day after it was liberated by Allied troops and several days before the shocking conditions of the camp were publicized throughout the world. Several years after his experience at Dachau, believing that we must never forget what happened, Smith unearthed his notes and the daily letters he wrote to his wife and used them as source materials for Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell. From the perspective of a young physician, Smith describes his experiences, shedding light on the immense difficulties and complexities of the large-scale tasks the small DP team completed, against great odds, to combat epidemic diseases and starvation and repatriate the former prisoners. Smith also describes some of the people the team tried to help—men, women, and children from all walks of life, of many nationalities and religions. Smith tells his moving story objectively, with simplicity and grace. While this book is the story of man's inhumanity to man, it is more than an account of Nazi persecution. It is about how Smith, whose previous experience had not prepared him for the immense horror of what he encountered at Dachau, quickly became a public health expert; how a small team improvised relief and combated a typhus epidemic; and how the soldiers of different countries had to get along with each other while dealing with the prejudices of some of the displaced people they were trying to help. Dachau contains six drawings by noted European artist Zoran Music, who was arrested by the Gestapo in Venice in 1944 and incarcerated at Dachau. The drawings were given to Smith when he left Dachau.

“A rare moral thriller in the tradition of Fahrenheit 451,” this stunning work from the author of Ishmael is set in a white-washed alternate world where Nazis won the war (Village Voice) Daniel Quinn, well known for Ishmael—a life-changing book for readers the world over—once again turns the tables and creates an otherworld that is very like our own, yet fascinating beyond words. Imagine that Nazi Germany was the first to develop an atomic bomb and the Allies surrendered. America was never bombed, occupied, or even invaded, but was nonetheless forced to recognize Nazi world dominance. The Nazis continued to press their campaign to rid the planet of “mongrel races” until eventually the world—from Capetown to Tokyo—was populated by only white faces. Two thousand years in the future, people don’t remember, or much care, about this distant past. The reality is that to be human is to be Caucasian, and what came before was literally ancient history having nothing to do with those then living. Now imagine that reincarnation is real, that souls migrate over time from one living creature to another, and that a soul that once animated an American black woman living at the time of World War II now animates an Aryan in Quinn’s new world—and that due to a traumatic accident, memories of this earlier incarnation assert themselves. Compared by readers and critics alike to 1984 and Brave New World, After Dachau is a new dystopian classic with much to say about our own time, and the dynamics of human history.

Dachau and the SS studies the concentration camp guards at Dachau, the first SS concentration camp and a national 'school' of violence for its concentration camp personnel. Set up in the first months of Adolf Hitler's rule, Dachau was a bastion of the Nazi 'revolution' and a key springboard for the ascent of Heinrich Himmler and the SS to control of the Third Reich's terror and policing apparatus. Throughout the pre-war era of Nazi Germany, Dachau functioned as an academy of violence where concentration camp personnel were schooled in steely resolution and the techniques of terror. An international symbol of Nazi depredation, Dachau was the cradle of a new and terrible spirit of destruction. Combining extensive new research into the pre-war history of Dachau with theoretical insights from studies of perpetrator violence, this book offers the first systematic study of the 'Dachau School'. It explores the backgrounds and socialization of thousands of often very young SS men in the camp and critiques the assumption that violence was an outcome of personal or ideological pathologies. Christopher Dillon analyses recruitment to the Dachau SS and evaluates the contribution of ideology, training, social psychology and masculine ideals to the conduct and subsequent careers of concentration camp guards. Graduates of the Dachau School would go on to play a central role in the wartime criminality of the Third Reich, particularly at Auschwitz. Dachau and the SS makes an original contribution to scholarship on the pre-history of the Holocaust and the institutional organisation of violence.

Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau. These names still evoke the horrors of Nazi Germany around the world. This 2001 book takes one of these sites, Dachau, and traces its history from the beginning of the twentieth century, through its twelve years as Nazi Germany's premier concentration camp, to the camp's postwar uses as prison, residential neighborhood, and, finally, museum and memorial site. With superbly chosen examples and an eye for telling detail, Legacies of Dachau documents how Nazi perpetrators were quietly rehabilitated to become powerful elites, while survivors of the concentration camps were once again marginalized, criminalized and silenced. Combining meticulous archival research with an encyclopedic knowledge of the extensive literatures on Germany, the Holocaust, and historical memory, Marcuse unravels the intriguing relationship between historical events, individual memory, and political culture, to offer a unified interpretation of their interaction from the Nazi era to the twenty-first century.