"The Good Old Days": The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (The Erwin and Riva Baker Memorial Collection)

One of the most painfully riveting books of our time. A first hand account of the greatest mass murder in history as told by the active and passive participants in genocide. What is different about this book is that it contains carefully compiled letters, journal entries and voluminous correspondence that prove beyond doubt that more members of the German population than ever before admitted to, knew about the Holocaust while it was happening. The title refers to a caption in the scrapbook of Kurt Franz, the commandant of the Treblinka concentration camp. Underneath the heading "Those Were the Days," and reproduced here, are pictures of smiling officers at a site where some 700,000 people were exterminated in the gas chambers. To refute revisionist historians who negate the testimony of Holocaust survivors, and to disprove those Germans who said they were coerced into murdering Jews, the German authors--Klee is a journalist, Dressen a lawyer and Riess a historian--present the damning and harrowing diaries, letters, photo albums and official reports of Germans who willingly participated in the Final Solution. A member of a unit that killed 33,771 Jews in the Ukranian Babi Yar ravine boasts: "It's almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work down there." Of the annihilation of thousands of Jews in White Russia, a commander says, "The action rid me of unneccessary mouths to feed." And wagging its tail for the camera is Franz's dog, which on numerous occasions was set upon Jews to bite off their genitals. The title "The Good Old Days" ("Schone Zeiten" in German) comes from the cover of a private photo album kept by concentration camp commandant Kurt Franz of Treblinka. This gruesomely sentimental and unmistakably authentic title introduces an disturbing collection of photographs, diaries, letters home, and confidential reports created by the executioners and sympathetic observers of the Holocaust. "The Good Old Days" reveals startling new evidence of the inhumanity of recent twentieth century history and is published now as yet another irrefutable response to the revisionist historians who claim to doubt the historic truth of the Holocaust. "The title 'The Good Old Days' ('Schöne Zeiten' in German) comes from the cover of a private photo album kept by concentration camp commandant Kurt Franz of Treblinka. This gruesomely sentimental and unmistakably authentic title introduces an equally disturbing collection of diaries, letters home, and confidential reports written by the executioners and sympathetic observers of the Holocaust, illustrated with numerous photographs they themselves took as 'souvenirs' of their work and 'achievements.'"--Jacket Bloomz Wednesday in Olkus 3Ilkenau ..............8 Each time a victim was beaten to death they started to clap ..............23 Pushed to their psychological limits ..............59 A new and better method of killing had to be found ..............68 Quite happy to take part in shootings ..............75 Once again I ve got to play general to the _ews ..............87 Execution as popular entertainment ..............107 Scores of soldiers some in bathing trunks watching ..............117 In the industrial area of Kamienna for the first time the existence of a rebel and sabotage organization with wide ramifications has been confirmed. Gathers selections from the diaries, letters, and confidential reports of those who participated in the Holocaust