Ss Dachau

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.

Chilling details from the American Seventh Army report about the liberation of prisoners from Dachau's death camps, with diary entries and eyewitness accounts.

Written by the staff of the U.S. 7th Army soon after its liberation, this report stands as evidence of some of the worst crimes of the Holocaust. The images contained within also document the inhuman suffering inflicted at Dachau. “DACHAU, 1933-1945, will stand for all time as one of history’s most gruesome symbols of inhumanity. There our troops found sights, sounds and stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be incomprehensible to the normal mind. DACHAU and death were synonymous. No words or pictures can carry the full impact of these unbelievable scenes but this report presents some of the outstanding facts and photographs in order to emphasize the type of crime which elements of the SS committed thousands of times a day, to remind us of the ghastly capabilities of certain classes of men, to strengthen our determination that they and their works shall vanish from the earth. The sections comprising this report were prepared by the agencies indicated. They remain substantially as they were originally submitted in the belief that to consolidate this material in a single literary style would seriously weaken its realism.”-Foreword.

Chilling details from the American Seventh Army report about the liberation of prisoners from Dachau's death camps, with diary entries and eyewitness accounts.

WARTIME BERLIN: The Niemann family - Karl, Minna and their four children - live in a quiet, suburban enclave. Every day Karl commutes to work, a business manager travelling around inspecting his “factories”. In the evenings he returns home to life as a normal family man.Three years ago Derek Niemann, born and raised in Scotland, made the chilling discovery that his grandfather Karl had been an officer in the SS - and that his “business” used thousands of slave labourers in concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Derek had known little about the German side of his family, but now a lifetime of unsettling hints and clues began to fall into place.With the help of surviving relatives and hundreds of previously unknown family photographs, Derek uncovers the true story of what Karl did. A Nazi in the Family is an illuminating portrayal of how ordinary people can fall into the service of a monstrous regime.

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.