A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust 1st Edition

While researching a book about the war, Mary Fulbrook, a professional historian, stumbled on the fact that her godmother had been married to a senior Nazi official. What made this all the more shocking was that Mary Fulbrook's her mother had been forced to flee Nazi Germany in the early 1930's because of her Jewish roots. After the war, Ms. Fulbrook's mother got back in touch with her best friend, sending her packages of food and clothing from England and, over the years, spending vacations and quality time together. That woman became Fulbrook's godmother. But this close family friend never let on that her husband had been a senior nazi official in charge of the civil administration in Bedzin, the small town near Auschwitz. As such, the husband was in charge of implementing the progressively harsher racial policies that stripped Jews of their property, segragated them into ghettos, dehumanizing them over time. After the war this official rewrote much of his timeline and escaped punishment for his activiities.Ms. Fulbrook uses this very compelling personal story as a starting point for a much more important examination of "ordinary nazis" vs "real nazis". She notes that after the many thousands of Germans were able to persuade themselves that they weren't "real nazis" because they had not engaged first hand in the genocide and mass murder of Jews and others. But it was these "ordinary Nazis" that enabled the Nazi state to function efficiently -- civil servants -- who made sure policies were carried out without question. She examines how this active compliance, the wilfull refusal to see where Nazi policies were headed, morphed into convenient self-denial after the war. It is a disturbing, excellently documented, nuanced book. If there is one criticism, it's that Ms. Fulbrook, in the name of fairness to her godmother's family, bends over backward to demonstrate her objectivity: well, maybe the former nazi was experiencing remorse, maybe her really did try to get out of the situation he found himself in...but the historical evidence Ms. Fulbrook uncovers is just too damning. (Ms. Fulbrook is aware of this, and admits her personal connection to the family made her give more attention to the excuses than perhaps warranted).Overall, for those with interest in this subject, this is a worthwhile read.

The book was not what I was expecting. It seemed to me to be an anguished expression of the author's discomfort with the fact that her godmother was the wife of a "good Nazi" civil servant. Nevertheless I felt that the book gave some real insight into the workings of a "middle manager" of the Nazi regime in western Poland. It had never occurred to me that there was a civil government in the occupied territories to attend to the day-to-day business of populating the resettlement camps and ultimate demise of the "unwanted" sub-humans. Nor had I realized that these unwanted sub-humans were valuable as slave labor. The book was thus enlightening in many aspects of day to day life in occupied Poland.I found the book to be a difficult read but in the end a valuable read.

A very unusual but original book. It seeks to answer how perfectly "normal" Germans could have little or no knowledge of The Holocaust {in their view}. The author focuses on officials and the Jews in a small town just 25 miles on the main railroad line to Auschwitz.The reader is warned that it takes some commitment to endure the repetition of the author's thesis and conclusions which appear time and again in the book. Just when you're ready to put the book down {"I've read enough already"} another aspect of the story emerges and I pressed on. The arguments are subtle but the repetition ensures that they emerge. In sum the reader is nicely rewarded for staying the reading course.In this day and age, this book shows helpful light on issues and consequences of obedience to The System and Government. The military has the concept of "unlawful orders" and civilians need to be so-equipped as well.I have seen this book reviewed ONLY in the "NY Review of Books" and were it not for that review I would never know this book existed. For anyone seeking some answers to this huge topic area, this book strikes me as a must-read.

This is a remarkable story, given that the author is a professional historian of the Third Reich and also an acquaintance of the family whose head is the topic of this book. It's the story of how one district administrator, whose district included Auschwitz (25 miles away) claimed to the end of his life that he didn't know what was happening to the Jews. Yet the evidence the author produces makes it a virtual certainty that the man knew what was going on when the Jews in his town were first ghettoized and then evacuated.This is a story that must have played itself over and over for the horrors of the Third Reich to have been possible. If you decide to read this book, stick with it as it takes a while to get going.

An extraordinary book about willful, shall we say even disingenuous claims of, ignorance on the part of a major minor Nazi official, about anti-Jewish "actions" being undertaken all around him, but. hey, I was one-town over at the time. Oh, actually, I wasn't even in town when it happened. Well, if I WAS, please note that I quickly volunteered to go kill poor Russians in an aggressive war in the East in order to escape any moral or legal guilt for killing Jews at home.

Important book. Very well written.

I read about this book in the paper and instantly wanted to read it.I have had a quick look through and can't wait to read it after Christmas when I have time to sit and read it cover to cover.

and i thought i knew it all..until i came accross this book

poignant

Excellent and absorbing book. Very well written.

I heard the author talk about this book, and ( surely, as the publishers must hope and plan) bought it. Not the usual subject matter for reading over the Christmas break, but I was wholly absorbed and horrified at the same time, literally could not consider reading anything else until I finished it. This book provides such clear and convincing arguments about how the Holocaust came about. Ordinary German townspeople in a small town and their Polish and their Jewish neighbours being displaced, then so many 'deported' . The tragedy is brought to life by such clear writing about death.

A sensitive and intelligent treatment of a horrific story

How did the Final Solution really operate and function beneath the main characters (Himmler, Heydrich and Eichmann) about whom several books have been written alongside the even greater number of general histories on this WWII tragedy, which rarely dip down to the local levels in great detail?This book tries to answer that by examining a middle level German born and raised civilian administrator posted close to Auschwitz, whom the author knew after the war for many years and whose family she has had close contact with since his death. This resulted in her having access to personal insights and written documents which many such researchers would never have.What we learn alongside the many other books on the development of the Holocaust post the invasion of Poland is ultimately not very surprising. German local government officials by career training and cognisant of Nazi anti Jewish policies from their own domestic experience, proved malleable and pragmatic in implementing the State's wishes in their new roles in the invaded territories. The pursuit of career and compliance with policies and orders that they rarely questioned or even less felt the need to contradict, delivered a well functioning infrastructure. The importance of this to the extermination of Jewish people by concentrating locally and then delivering them for extermination in the concentration camps is the main value of the book's analysis.The book is clearly very thoroughly researched (with over 50 of its 420 pages being Footnotes and Index) and in written style reads like an academic thesis, which I must admit made it a heard read for me. The lead character post the war made a successful transition to a senior role in German state government and was never prosecuted for any role in the events in Poland. This makes him pretty comparable with many of his peers whom the Allies quickly realised were needed to keep West Germany functioning for the Cold War and certainly within Germany (as in post Vichy France) little appetite existed locally for extensive prosecutions beyond the key leaders.Where I additionally struggle with books like this is what I would term their heavy use of retrospective judgement. Other recent books I have read (notably "The weight of a mustard seed" by Wendell Steavenson on an army general living under Saddam Hussein's Iraq) produced the same concern which is would one have behaved any differently in the same circumstances? This is not to absolve these persons of culpability in facilitating certain events and actions but understanding "why" is sometimes as critical as "how".

How much did the average German know about what occurred during the Holocaust as it was happening? How much of what they said after the war was truth and how much a fiction to enable them to live their life or avoid imprisonment? That is the question that the author of this book sets our to answer by exploring the lives of Udo Klausa and his and his wife, Alexandra. The couple lived in a town near the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, a town that had a Jewish population, one of whom they employed as a gardener.A book like this is important because of what it shows. The author is able to showcase exactly what an ordinary administrator living in the Reich during the war would have known, using original documents and other evidence from the time. It also shows in parallel the experiences of both the oppressor and the victim. This is important because to disregard one half of the equation, the Nazis, gives and incomplete picture.What Fulbrook has done well is to present a complete general picture of not only how something happened but what the effects of the event were on everyone involved. The book isn't easy reading for Fulbrook doesn't pull any punches, but it is a must read because of the picture that is given. It promotes discussion and adds levels of understanding. Any student of World War II or history should read this book.

the angle that this book is taken from is an interesting one. the facilitators behind teh scenes to the holocaust are never really focused on in any depth so its intersting to see them in the limelight. how these people reacted before during and after thier involvement in the holocuast is examined by the author in some detail, sometimes tailing off from essential information which I found detratced from teh pace and direction of teh book. Also you notice that teh author allows her own feelings to enter into certain parts of teh books which some will find engaging but other wont it really shouldnt show up in a history book as anything other than analysis. But Im not sure it is entirely meant to be a pure history book.in short a very interesting book on a rare aspect of a wide subject

Well worth reading if only to give one a sense of the atrocious time. I would certainly hope that a lot of people will read it.

How did a small town in Poland contribute to the Holocaust? The history of Bedzin and its inhabitants between 1939 and 1945, and long afterwards is a fascinating study on self delusion and history as people would like us to remember it, and them. Much like Gerald Reitlinger's "SS the Excuse for a Nation", it points out that not everyone was ignorant of what happened. It also shows once again that the Nazi state was not as all pervasive as Hollywood and the revised history as promulgated by some German and Polish historians is not strictly true. The sections dealing with the post war West Germany, and how people reconciled their own failings, and indeed crimes, to soothe their own and their families conscince is the truly frightening part. Essential and disturbing reading. Only the somewhat haphazrd layout disappoints.

How could ordinary Germans like Udo Klausa, a happily married family man and Bedzin administrator,get drawn into the horrors of the Nazi holocaust? This meticulous and scholarly book explains how it happened that complicity in the persecution of the Jews spread so wide and how people justified what they did. Highly recommended if you already know a lot about this terrible era in European history and want to deepen and extend your knowledge and understanding.

Nothing in this book ought to surprise anyone. It is a case-study of the actions and attitudes of a German functionary under the Third Reich. Professor Mary Fulbrook was disconcerted to learn that her godmother's husband had held a worryingly senior post in German-occupied East Prussia during the war. Not only that, the region for which he was responsible was about one marathon's run from Auschwitz-Birkenau itself, but what ran right past Udo Klausa's (expropriated) home were the cattle-trains taking the Jewish prisoners to where Arbeit Macht Frei.Klausa was the local Landrat. This was a sort of Governor's post, provided one does not interpret that in the American sense. His responsibilities also took in policing, so I suppose there was something of the Prefect in the job's TOR. He left his own memoirs of his time in office, and these provide special insights into how the man thought, particularly how he justified himself to himself. Professor Fulbrook displays near-superhuman self-restraint in the way she examines his motives. She considers every possible alternative that could be adduced in his favour, but the main conclusion is staring her and the rest of us in the face - Klausa facilitated the Final Solution through the efficient way, commented on by his superiors, in which he followed orders. It would be right to believe that the final atrocity was something he would never himself have ordered. It would probably be right to think that the brutality of the earlier steps taken towards `Germanisation' would have been alien to his nature. All the same, none of it would have been possible without the active participation of Klausa and many like him.It is even quite likely that the nervous problems that afflicted him were largely caused by inner tensions that he experienced as the monstrosity of the system he was administering became too clear for him to rationalise away or ignore. They were rounding up Jews right there in Bedzin to take to Auschwitz. The stench of burning flesh and hair would surely even have reached him and his genteel wife Alexandra on days when the wind was in the right quarter. Auschwitz was not even a hidden site, it was wide open to view from the low hills surrounding it. Who could possibly not have known? Well, Udo Klausa tried to tell himself and others that he didn't know, helping this self-deception with a creative treatment of the dates of his periods of absence, plus, of course, convenient and intermittent amnesia. Any of this surprise anyone? In fact Udo never came to trial after the war, but if he had his defence council would have done much the same.I suppose the new information that this book has to impart consists mainly in its detailed accounts of what went on in Bedzin following the Nazi occupation. Klausa was not in post until after the horrible burning of the synagogue, its doors locked on the frantic Jews trying to escape. Again, it's a matter of filling in a less detailed picture that I already had, but the sheer filthy vileness of the invaders' conduct came across more forcibly than before precisely because so many gaps are filled in. Nevertheless Mary Fulbrook's tone stays a model of academic detachment. In the last couple of chapters she lets the emotion out to some extent, but only over the general issues, not in respect of Udo Klausa. `Careerism, courage, cowardice and callousness' is an assessment she offers on p341, and you might well ask `Why courage?' His courage was in his repeated attempts to fight on the front and get away from his desk in Bedzin. He was no draft-dodger, indeed quite the opposite, but he was trying to distance himself from something worse that he would have been doing as a civilian, and the cause he chose to fight for was the system he was inescapably serving in whichever capacity he chose.Klausa was a Catholic, and although Mary Fulbrook has to remark on how little this got in the way of Klausa's career, the most significant lack that I find in the book is any kind of assessment of the stance of the Catholic church in general. Traditional Catholicism has or had a very rigorously worked-out book of rules system concerning moral conduct. This code has always seemed to me to be more concerned with (a) sex and (b) doctrine (the latter often completely meaningless) than with what I might think of as more serious moral issues. I would have liked to know how absolution, confession, forgiveness of sins and the rest of it guided Klausa's actions. In fact I don't even recall any mention of such matters cited from his memoirs.After the war only a small percentage of Germans considered for arraignment for collaboration with the regime actually came to trial. There were various reasons for this, sheer practicality in the main but also in some cases because the parties in question were thought to be potentially useful in the new American battle against communism. If you are looking to find some disinterested and abstract pursuit of justice you may be surprised at this, but most of us won't be. Udo Klausa did not even suffer career-wise in the Federal Republic any more than he had under the Third Reich, unlike one Alexander Hohenstein (apparently a pseudonym for reasons not stated), who was sharply demoted for failing to show enthusiasm for public hangings, these being a notable feature of the post-1939 period. Not to be outdone, the Federal Republic considered his much less committed pursuit of his duties in a less senior position than Klausa's to rule him out of any further career in the civil service.The tone of this book is not and does not have to be one of `J'accuse.' An older language says what it is all really about: `Res ipsa loquitur' - it all speaks for itself.

My first visit to Auschwitz, Birkenau and the surrounding area in Poland will live with me forever. I recall passing a sign for Oświęcim as I approached what appeared to be an ordinary, relatively small town. The normality of everyday existence was only interrupted a short distance later, when the first of Auschwitz's concentration camps came into view, confronting me with a chilling reminder of both the proximity of this "normality," and its co-existence with the "barbarity" of the Nazi regime.My visits to all the local concentration camps at that time made an impression upon me, not least being the realization of how such extremes had co-existed. Reading this excellent, scholarly and well written book brought it all back to me, while again making it all too evident that these had also been ever present realities during the Holocaust itself.This study is humane and devastatingly honest providing an oblique analysis of the Holocaust, and the everyday lives of the multitude of civilian "facilitators" and "administrators," who were undeniably complicit with the Nazi ideology. Involved as efficient and essential cogs in the industrial killing machine of the Third Reich, while providing themselves with the "psychological get-out clause" that they were really "decent" and "ordinary" people, who didn't really know the "full story" of what was happening, and so were never "really guilty" of being complicit in mass murder.The book primarily focuses on Udo Klausa, who was the chief administrator of Bedzin, a small town some 25 miles away from Auschwitz but it doesn't end with Klausa. It provides a rational investigation of the myths which enabled those who through passive complicity, personally considered themselves to be "decent" Germans, in order to separate themselves from who were perceived as the "real Nazis."The book plus its narrative is both emotional and disturbing in what it reveals about aspects of German and Polish society, which did not oppose the vicious anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime embarking upon the genocide of the entire Jewish population of Europe.This is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the Holocaust. I would also recommend the following titles which provide a wider perspective on the issues discussed in Mary Fulbrook's excellent work. Thank you for your time.Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the HolocaustThe Nazi Terror: Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary GermansOrdinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 11 and the Final Solution in Poland: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the HolocaustThe Nazi Terror: Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary GermansOrdinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 11 and the Final Solution in Poland: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

There has long been the belief in The Good Germans, who knew nothing of the atrocities on their doorsteps, and this fascinating book, whilst not putting that myth to rest, shows that many more knew, and did nothing, than have admitted the truth. I agree with other reviewers about the author putting her moral judgements on the subjects, but this is more than outweighed by the facts included. All in all, this book does give a different perspective on events in the holocaust, and much to think about.