I thought I knew about the Holocaust before, and I thought I knew what Auschwitz was, but my reading taught me so much more than I would have ever learned in school. Holocaust, before World War II may have been used to define, as the dictionary states, "a destruction or slaughter of a mass scale." Now the word holocaust defines one historic tragic event, which impacted not only Europe but the entire world as well. .
Laurence Reed's, "Auschwitz: A History" taught me a lot about the progression of both the Holocaust and the famous death camp. Heinrich Himmler of chief of Hitler's secret police, recruited farmer/member of the SS, Rudolf Hoss, for a special job. Hoss' job would be to take on the first Nazi concentration camp in the small Polish town of Oswiecim, which translated in German to Auschwitz. Himmler became in charge of moving the Jews and ethnic Germans out of Germany, but he ran into a problem with space. Himmler had begun transporting hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans to the territory in Poland after it was divided up between Germany and the Soviet Union. He also did not know what to do with the two million Polish Jews left in the new Nazi territory. They set up ghettos for the ethnic Germans, which had been placed in Poland, but soon there were too many and not enough space. .
Himmler instructed Hoss to begin work on Auschwitz, and he arrived in 1940, along with around thirty German criminals from another concentration camp. They were called Kapos, these inmates, put in charge by the SS, were mainly there to control the Jewish prisoners. In the book Hoss recollects Himmler's original plan for Auschwitz, "Every necessary agricultural experiment was to be attempted there. Massive laboratories and plant cultivation departments had to be built" (24). In order for this to be carried out they needed it to be built, and the Jews acted as the construction crew.
