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Generations and Violence Through the German Dictatorships
Mary Fulbrook
£40.00
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Joint Winner of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, 2012
A Small Town Near Auschwitz
Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust
Mary Fulbrook
448 pages
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15 black and white halftones, 4 maps
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234x156mm
978-0-19-960330-5
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Hardback
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20 September 2012
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- The story of a small town near Auschwitz, its 'perfectly ordinary' local administrator, and his involvement in the Nazi persecution of the Jews
- Shows how this typical Nazi functionary became involved in the unfolding stigmatization and degradation of the Jews under his authority
- Combines the personal story of Udo Klausa with the wider story of the countless functionaries like him who made the Holocaust possible
- Traces the conflicting memories and evasions of Klausa's later life after the war
- Includes the poignant personal angle of an author whose mother was both a refugee from Nazi Germany and close friend of Klausa's wife
The Silesian town of Bedzin lies a mere twenty-five miles from Auschwitz; through the linked ghettos of Bedzin and its neighbouring town, some 85,000 Jews passed on their way to slave labour or the gas chambers.
The principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, Udo Klausa, was a happily married family man. He was also responsible for implementing Nazi policies towards the Jews in his area - inhumane processes that were the precursors of genocide. Yet he later claimed, like so many other Germans after the war, that he had 'known nothing about it'; and that he had
personally tried to save a Jew before he himself managed to leave for military service. A Small Town Near Auschwitz re-creates Udo Klausa's story. Using a wealth of personal letters, memoirs, testimonies, interviews and other sources, Mary Fulbrook pieces together his role in the unfolding stigmatization and degradation of the Jews under his authoritiy, as well as the heroic attempts at resistance on the part of some of the victims of Nazi racial policies in this area. She also gives us a fascinating insight into the inner conflicts of a Nazi functionary who, throughout, considered himself a 'decent' man. And she explores the conflicting memories and evasions of his life after the war.
But the book is much more than a portrayal of an individual man. Udo Klausa's
case is so important because it is in many ways so typical. Behind Klausa's story is the larger story of how countless local functionaries across the Third Reich facilitated the murderous plans of a relatively small number among the Nazi elite - and of how those plans could never have been realized, on the same scale, without the diligent cooperation of these generally very ordinary administrators. As Fulbrook shows, men like Klausa 'knew' and yet mostly suppressed this knowledge, performing their day jobs without apparent recognition of their own role in the system, or any sense of personal wrongdoing or remorse - either before or after 1945.
This account is no ordinary historical reconstruction. For Fulbrook did not discover Udo Klausa amongst the archives. She
has known the Klausa family all her life. She had no inkling of her subject's true role in the Third Reich until a few years ago, a discovery that led directly to this inescapably personal professional history.Readership: All those interested in the history of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Second World War.
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Mary Fulbrook, Professor of German History, University College London Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London. She has written widely on modern German history, including A Concise History of Germany (1990); A History of Germany 1918-2000: The Divided Nation; (1991, 2008); German National Identity after the Holocaust (1999); Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR (1995, also published by Oxford University Press); and The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (2005). Her most recent book is Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (Oxford University Press, 2011). A fellow of the British Academy, she is former
Chair of the German History Society and a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Foundation for the former Concentration Camps at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora.
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"absorbing ... a precise and moving account" - Jane Caplan, Times Literary Supplement "The readers of this book will obtain a new and different perspective on the Holocaust as its central figure serves as an example of the vast number of Nazis in administrative positions who made the process of systematic killing possible by their dedicated and diligent commitment to a murderous regime." - Gerhard L. Weinberg, History Book Club
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Preface
1: Legacies of Violence
2: Before 1939
3: Border Crossings
4: The Making of a Nazi Landrat
5: An Early Question of Violence
6: 'Only administration'
7: Means of Survival
8: Escalation, 1941-42
9: Towards Extermination
10: The Deportations of August 1942
11: Ghettoization for the 'Final Solution'
12: Final Thresholds
13: Afterwards and After-words
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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