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In the Shadow of Auschwitz
German Massacres against Polish Civilians, 1939–1945
Daniel Brewing
Translated from the German by Alex Skinner
356 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-80073-089-2 $155.00/£115.00 / Hb / Published (June 2022)
eISBN 978-1-80073-090-8 eBook
Reviews
“In this deeply researched volume, evidence of the author's masterful command of a massive volume of primary and secondary materials, Brewing…focuses on German massacres in rural and urban Polish villages and communities, which he defines and examines in careful detail…Sections of this study are emotionally wrenching to read, but the scholarly balance justifies the numerous prizes this book has received. It is a major contribution to both German and Polish historiography and has important lessons and insights for society as a whole….Highly Recommended.” • Choice
“Based on a dense archival source base that captures different levels of German decision-making against relevant literatures in German, Polish, and English, Brewing offers a model for the escalation of killing that remains attuned to variation…The book’s central contribution will be on the isolation of the massacre as an event deserving of its own analysis, though historians of the Holocaust will also be interested in the way the early occupation radicalized German behavior and how partisan and anti-partisan activities made Polish Jews vulnerable.” • German Studies Review
Praise for the German Edition:
“Brewing, in his meticulously researched, excellently structured and captivatingly written study, focuses for the first time on the massacres of Polish civilians mainly committed by Germans.” • Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“Daniel Brewing closes a research gap on German occupation in Poland and provides an excellent basis for further investigation. He sets new standards with his carefully argued, theoretically well-founded, and excellent, empirically rich study.” • Sehepunkte
Description
The Nazi invasion of Poland was the first step in an unremittingly brutal occupation, one most infamously represented by the network of death camps constructed on Polish soil. The systematic murder of Jews in the camps has understandably been the focus of much historical attention. Less well-remembered today is the fate of millions of non-Jewish Polish civilians, who—when they were not expelled from their homeland or forced into slave labor—were murdered in vast numbers both within and outside of the camps. Drawing on both German and Polish sources, In the Shadow of Auschwitz gives a definitive account of the depredations inflicted upon Polish society, tracing the ruthless implementation of a racial ideology that cast ethnic Poles as an inferior race.
Daniel Brewing is Assistant Professor of Modern History at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. His scholarly work has been supported with numerous scholarships from prestigious institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the German Historical Institute Washington DC, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. He is the recipient of several awards including the Geisteswissenschaften International prize in 2019.
Subject: Genocide HistoryHistory: World War II
Area: Central/Eastern Europe
Contents
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