After Dachau

After Dachau
Author: Daniel Quinn
Publisher: Steerforth
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1581952406

“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

Dachau
Author: Marcus J. Smith
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438420323

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.

Legacies of Dachau

Legacies of Dachau
Author: Harold Marcuse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 676
Release: 2001-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521552042

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.

Dachau 29 April 1945

Dachau 29 April 1945
Author: Sam Dann
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780896723917

Members of the Rainbow Division, 42nd Infantry discuss what it was like to participate in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in April of 1945.

Innocent at Dachau

Innocent at Dachau
Author: Joseph Halow
Publisher: Legion for the Survival of Freedom
Total Pages: 368
Release: 1993
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

"American teenager Joe Halow was still a boy when he sailed to war-ravaged Germany in late 1946. The year he spent there, taking part in some of the most sensational of the war-crime trials of the defeated Nazis, turned him into a man. Innocent at Dachau is Joe Halow's account of his year in postwar Germany, above all his work as a court reporter during the U.S. Army courts-martial at Dachau. There Halow witnessed, recorded and transcribed some of the most gripping testimony from some of the most sensational trials of the postwar years: of SS guards from Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dora/Nordhausen; of the inmates who carried out their orders as kapos (prisoner trusties); and of German villagers who attacked and murdered downed American fliers in the last phase of the Allies' terrifying air war. Armed with an ironclad faith in American righteousness when he arrived, young Halow soon saw the flaws and the abuses in the Dachau trials: reliance on ex post facto law and broad conspiracy theories; abuse of prisoners during interrogation; and the shocking tolerance, even encouragement, of perjured testimony by concentration camp survivors. The teenaged American court reporter came to sympathize with the plight of the accused, particularly those convicted, sentenced or executed unjustly. Innocent at Dachau is Joe Halow's story of his coming of age, his loss of innocence, in the Dachau courts. And it's the human drama of how he came to terms with his own anti-German feelings as he loved and worked in a Germany still heaped with rubble and ruled by the black market, in the shadow of the looming Iron Curtain and the approaching Cold War. Innocent at Dachau is also the story of how, four decades later, Joe Halow went back - back to the long-classified records of the Army's trials at Dachau, where he found astounding confirmation, from official sources, of his own misgivings about the trials; and back to Germany, for a moving visit with one of the German SS men Joe Halow watched testify about his role at the Nordhausen concentration camp."--Provided by publisher.

The Priest Barracks

The Priest Barracks
Author: Guillaume Zeller
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2017-05-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1681497662

At the Nazi concentration camp Dachau, three barracks out of thirty were occupied by clergy from 1938 to 1945. The overwhelming majority of the 2,720 men imprisoned in these barracks were Catholics—2,579 priests, monks, and seminarians from all over Europe. More than a third of the prisoners in the "priest block" died there. The story of these men, which has been submerged in the overall history of the concentration camps, is told in this riveting historical account. Both tragedies and magnificent gestures are chronicled here--from the terrifying forced march in 1942 to the heroic voluntary confinement of those dying of typhoid to the moving clandestine ordination of a young German deacon by a French bishop. Besides recounting moving episodes, the book sheds new light on Hitler's system of concentration camps and the intrinsic anti-Christian animus of Nazism.

Society of Terror

Society of Terror
Author: Paul Neurath
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2015-12-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317251814

During 1938 and 1939, Paul Neurath was a Jewish political prisoner in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. He owed his survival to a temporary Nazi policy allowing release of prisoners who were willing to go into exile and the help of friends on the outside who helped him obtain a visa. He fled to Sweden before coming to the United States in 1941. In 1943, he completed The Society of Terror, based on his experiences in Dachau and Buchenwald. He embarked on a long career teaching sociology and statistics at universities in the United States and later in Vienna until his death in September 2001. After liberation, the horrific images of the extermination camps abounded from Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places. Neurath's chillingly factual discussion of his experience as an inmate and his astute observations of the conditions and the social structures in Dachau and Buchenwald captivate the reader, not only because of their authenticity, but also because of the work's proximity to the events and the absence of influence of later interpretations. His account is unique also because of the exceptional links Neurath establishes between personal experience and theoretical reflection, the persistent oscillation between the distanced and sober view of the scientist and that of the prisoner.

The Last Train to Dachau

The Last Train to Dachau
Author: Robert B. Niklewicz
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2008-10-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 145208792X

The Last Train to Dachau is based on the real life plight of the Miller family during World War II. With the invasion of Poland by the Germans, the story follows the family and their experiences of: the occupation, hunger, cold, and the terror in their home town. This family of five was Polish Catholic, but had a German-like surname. This situation placed them between the Germans, who wanted them to sign a loyalty declaration, which they refused, and the community which assumed that they had. The story tells of the horrors and obstacles that they faced and had to overcome to stay together and live. Emilia, Alicia and Leszek are children that spend most of their youth surviving both the physical and emotional stresses of war. Wladyslawa, the mother, is a worker in a Red Cross shelter during the day, but often had to travel at night to find black market food for her family. Wiktor, the father, was conscripted to a labor train after the surrender of Warsaw. He worked under threat of great harm to his family while forced to travel and repair damaged trains and tracks across Poland and Germany. His travels and experiences on a recovery and repair crew gave him an avenue to stay alive while still resisting his oppressors. The intensity of the story increases as the Millers face the brutality of their captors who desperately try to accomplish their final solution for all Poles in the closing days of the war. The reader will find it hard to put the book down as the Millers face their fate.