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From Schmelt Camp to "Little Auschwitz

Susanne Barth
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A01=Susanne Barth
annihilation through labor
Auschwitz
Author_Susanne Barth
Blechhammer
Category=NHTZ1
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Europe
forced labor
genocide
German Order Police
history of Upper Silesia
Holocaust
Jews of Eastern Upper Silesia
persecution of Jews
Poland under Nazi occupation
Reich Highway Company
Reichsautobahn
Schmelt Camp
Second World War
SSSD
WWII

Product details

  • ISBN 9781612499543
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 15 Aug 2024
  • Publisher: Purdue University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
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Description
From Schmelt Camp to "Little Auschwitz": Blechhammer's Role in the Holocaust is the first in-depth study of the second largest Auschwitz subcamp, Blechhammer (Blachownia Śląska), and its lesser known yet significant prehistory as a so-called Schmelt camp, a forced labor camp for Jews operating outside the concentration camp system. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents and a wide array of survivor testimonies, the book provides novel findings on Blechhammer's role in the Holocaust in Eastern Upper Silesia, a formerly Polish territory annexed to Nazi Germany in the fall of 1939, where 120,000 Jews lived.

Established in the spring of 1942 to construct a synthetic fuel plant, the camp's abhorrent living conditions led to the death of thousands of young Jews conscripted from the ghettos or taken off deportation convoys from Western Europe. Blechhammer was not only used for selecting parts of the Jewish ghetto population for Auschwitz, but also for killing pregnant women and babies. As an Auschwitz satellite, Blechhammer became the scene of brutal executions and massacres of prisoners refusing to go on the Death March. This microhistory unearths the far-reaching complicity of often overlooked perpetrators, such as the industrialists, factory guards, policemen, and "ordinary" civilians in these atrocities, but more importantly, it focuses on the victims, reconstructing the prisoners' daily life and suffering, as well as their survival strategies.
About Susanne Barth
Susanne Barth received a PhD in history from Oldenburg University (Germany) and currently is a Thesaurus Poloniae Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Cultural Center in Kraków, Poland. Her research was funded by a Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies and a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellowship at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. Her articles have appeared in Shofar; S:I.M.O.N. - Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation; and European History Quarterly.

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