Skip to main content
Thumbnail for Architects of death : the family who engineered the Holocaust

Architects of death : the family who engineered the Holocaust

Bartlett, Karen2018
Books
Topf and Sons designed and built the crematoria at the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Belzec, Dachau, Mauthausen and Gusen. At its height sixty-six Topf triple muffle ovens were in operation - forty-six of which were at Auschwitz. For five years the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz had been the engine of the Holocaust, facilitating the murder and incineration of more than one million people, most of them Jews. Yet such a spectacularly evil feat of engineering was designed not by the Nazi SS, but by a small respectable firm of German engineers: the owners and engineers of J.A. Topf and Sons. These were not Nazi sadists, but men who were playboys and the sons of train drivers. They were driven not by ideology, but by love affairs, personal ambition and bitter personal rivalries to create the ultimate human killing and disposal machines - even at the same time as their company sheltered Nazi enemies from the death camps. The intense conflagration of their very ordinary motives created work that surpassed in its inhumanity even the demands of the SS. In order to fulfil their own 'dreams' they created the ultimate human nightmare.
Imprint:
London : Biteback Publishing, 2018.
Collation:
xvii, 297 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm.
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-290) and index.
ISBN:
9781785900426
Dewey class:
940.5318
Language:
English
Added title:
BRN:
314442
LocationCollectionCall numberStatus/Desc
Hampton LibraryAdult Non Fiction - History940.5318 BARAvailable
View my active saved list
0 items in my active saved list