Hyper-efficient synthesis and updated

This is an excellent update on the current historical knowledge about the concentration camp and the center's most iconic killing of the destruction of European Jewry. From the cover photo, the discount to the historical time of deniers clocks starts very strong, for the white smoke, on the left in the photo, taken by a Royal Air Force reconnaissance aircraft passed the vertical Birkenau 23 August 1944 is the one escaping from a mass grave in which open burning corpses. Plans and specific cards that perfectly describe the evolution of a site with complex and multiple aims. A tight timeline. Narrow ranges figures presented in a table, casually, summarizes several decades of research (1.060 to 1,095,000 Jews died on the spot from a total of 1.263 to 1,308,000 deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau - less than 2% margin of error, who will dare challenge these figures now?). A macro-historical approach combined with a micro approach. Development that involves two main views, one adopted by Raul HILBERG (executioners) and the other by Saul Friedlander (victims) in their respective Heads of work. About one that manages to reconcile opening up vast prospects and description of highly significant details. And finally, an updated bibliography of 121 references, and two indexes of place names and people. What more? The facts are clearly established, stubborn and terrible: they speak for themselves, no need to comment. Those who know nothing or very little about Auschwitz before opening this little book does not emerge intact from this reading: they will close the book being standing KO. Frankly, it seems very hard to do better in the main text of 106 pages.

Tal Bruttmann achieved a remarkable extension work, which draws heavily on the work of its predecessors but also on its own research. This work, which is in my opinion more than a summary trial, is nevertheless a must for at least three reasons.
1) The history of Auschwitz has long been subject to misinterpretation, as illustrated by the phrase "extermination camp." Tal Bruttmann it clear that the great majority of the deportees arrived in Auschwitz alive did not put one foot inside a barbed wire fence, since when arriving by train has succeeded in the time that followed, the entry into a gas chamber. Even at Auschwitz and Birkenau, where a killing center was installed close to the concentration camp, extermination took place outside the camp. This is why the generation of historians which belongs prefer Tal Bruttmann after Raul HILBERG which once again saw just the first, talking about "killing center" to designate the sites where concrete was being held extermination.
2) Auschwitz and Birkenau are the centers of killing that have worked the longest, because they have mostly destroyed the Polish non-Jews. Treblinka is 900,000 dead in 6 months, because the Warsaw ghetto was only a hundred kilometers. Auschwitz is 1.3 million deaths in nearly 39 months between November 1941 and January 1945, because the exterminated Jews had been deported from the rest of the continent to a central rail hub in Europe: Auschwitz. This is where we begin to understand why Auschwitz is one of the highlights of the destruction of European Jewry and the construction of the European Union '
3) Bruttmann Tal situates Auschwitz in a long chronology that begins in the Middle Ages and on continental expansion card. The author provides interesting information on the "area of ​​interest" of 40 square kilometers organized around Auschwitz, which was the seat of economic activity essentially agricultural and industrial 'and scientists a plant capable of Soviet origin to provide rubber was of great interest the SS. The thesis of Tal Bruttmann, if there is one in this book, is the following: commercial hub since the Middle Ages, was Auschwitz during the Second World War, a concentration camp, a modification center death and an economic-industrial complex.

If you want to read only two books in French on the subject, so no need to hesitate long before the oceanic extent of available literature: this little book can certainly be one of them you will read, while the other will be the testimony of Primo Levi ("If This Is a Man", Presses Pocket collection Literature) or that of Robert Antelme ("Humankind", Gallimard Tel collection).

The modesty of the price and the size of this book will allow you even consider the offer repeatedly around you if, as is increasingly common, you hear someone trivialize or deny the hyperbolic gravity acts committed in Auschwitz.

History teachers of ninth grade and first stand there a good and short book to suggest to their students.