Item #7237 Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Death Camps. Karen Bartlett.

Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Death Camps

New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018.

First American Edition, 1st Printing. Hardcover. First American Edition with full number line indicating first printing. 9 1/2" X 6 1/2". xvii, 297pp. Very mild shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of unclipped dust jacket. White paper over boards with spine lettered in orange. Light bumps to corners and top and bottom of spine. A light spot of toning to edge of text block. Pages are clean and unmarked. Binding is firm and sound.

ABOUT THIS BOOK:
A sobering story of an industrial family’s cold efficiency behind the design of the ovens at Auschwitz

Architects of Death tells the astonishing story of how the gas chambers and crematoria that facilitated the murder and incineration of more than one million people in the Holocaust were designed not by the Nazi SS, but by a small respectable family firm of German engineers. Topf and Sons designed and built the crematoria at the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Belzec, Dachau, Mauthausen, and Gusen. At its height, 66 Topf triple muffle ovens were in operation 46 of which were at Auschwitz.

These were not Nazi sadists, but men who were playboys and the sons of train conductors. They were driven not by ideology, but by love affairs, personal ambition, and bitter personal rivalries. Even while their firm created the ultimate human killing and disposal machines, their company sheltered Nazi enemies from the death camps. The intense conflagration of their very ordinary motives created work that surpassed in inhumanity even the demands of the SS.

But the company that achieved this spectacularly evil feat of engineering typify the banality of evil. In the 1930s their family firm produced apparatus for all sorts of industries baking, brewing, the firing of ceramics. Ovens for crematoria accounted for only a small proportion of their business, but it is for these that the Topf brothers became infamous. Their name can still be seen stamped on the iron furnaces of Auschwitz.(Publisher). Very good / very good. Item #7237
ISBN: 9781250117700

Price: $20.00

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