Histories about the perpetrators of the Holocaust tend to focus on the hands-on killers or the architects of genocide in the upper echelons of the Nazi party. But it took an enormous amount of administrative work to make lists of Jews in an area, confiscate their property, deprive them of food, jobs and housing, round them up, push them into ghettos, arrange rail transport to take them to the camps. Who were the pencil-pushers who did this work? What did they think about what they were doing--at the time and after the war?

Mary Fulbrook, a professor of German history at University College, London, found herself in a surprising position to look at these questions when she discovered that the husband of her godmother, her mother's childhood best friend, was the administrator of the major town of Bedzin in Silesia. Though he was a member of the Nazi party and there is more than enough remaining in the archival record to show that he was an efficient cog in the killing machine, Udo Klausa never paid a price for his role in implementing the Holocaust; in fact, he went on to a successful postwar career.

What's more, Klausa insisted that he was not at all responsible for the terrible fate of the Bedzin Jews. This, even though the population of 50,000, almost half of whom were Jews, was reported by Klausa himself to be down to 27,000 by 1943. In other words, all the Jews gone under his watch. Most were rounded up in two Aktions and sent to work camps or to death down the road in Auschwitz. Klausa is representative of the thousands of ordinary Germans without whose desk work the Germans could never have achieved their genocidal aims.

In this detailed account, Fulbrook inexorably marshals the evidence showing what Klausa did. Her personal connection allows her to add chilling and illuminating details of the dehumanization that helped so many self-described "ordinary" and "decent" Germans see Jews as inferior beings infecting the nation. Frau Klausa's letters to Fulbrook's mother describe the Jews in town as being in a disgusting state; ignoring that it was the actions of the Nazi occupiers that deprived them of their jobs and homes, as well as decent food, clothing and shelter. Frau Klausa then blithely describe how the Klausas moved into a house appropriated from a Jewish family and how cheaply they were able to furnish the house with confiscated Jewish property.

Fulbrook carefully walks a difficult line for a professional historian who has a personal acquaintance with her subject. She never allows her personal relationship to interfere with her professional responsibility. We are provided with a thoroughgoing and clear-eyed revelation of how Klausa (and, by extension, many other Germans) justified his inhuman behavior during the war and reinvented his wartime history for more palatable consumption the rest of his life.

This is an important addition to Holocaust history and to our understanding of how a population can become complicit in the most horrific crimes.

Disclosure: I received a free publisher's review copy of this book. ( )

Back when I was a naïve bright-eyed college student thinking of becoming a school teacher and minoring in German, I briefly flirted with the idea of incorporating my love of history and my German degree by trying to solve the unsolvable while obtaining my Ph.D. What was that unsolvable question? Why did an entire population ignore/remain in the dark/allow the horrors that befell anyone who was not of Aryan decent in Germany and its controlled countries during the 1930s and 1940s? Mary Fulbrook explores a similar unsolvable question in A Small Town Near Auschwitz, as she explores one man’s experiences as a lower-level bureaucrat in a Nazi-dominated area roughly twenty miles from the infamous Auschwitz death camp.

A Small Town Near Auschwitz is a fascinating story that unfortunately reads like a poorly-written dissertation. Seriously, if one had a dissertation checklist as to formatting and necessary requirements, one could go down said checklist and mark off each item as one reads the book. In addition, it is filled with details, big and small, that contribute to a vivid portrayal of Bedjzin before and during the war but that also bog down the narrative. The details are in and of themselves very interesting, but they force a reader to dwell on terrifying and extremely emotional experiences that make it difficult to read. One has to take a break from the emotional trauma that Ms. Fulbrook’s words create. In other words, it is very slow and cumbersome reading.

Another issue found with A Small Town Near Auschwitz is Ms. Fulbrook’s close association with her subject matter. While she makes no attempts to hide her connections to Udo Klausa and his wife, there are times in the narrative where it is obvious that Ms. Fulbrook is not quite as objective as she is trying to be or as she perhaps should be as a historian. Her conclusions are tainted, at times, with a sense of guilt that she was either drawing such negative conclusions about a long-time family friend or that she was trying to find a more positive explanation for behaviors or attitudes that probably should not be positively explained. This sense of shame weakens her conclusions as she allows her personal history to impact them.

That being said, without the close relationship between Mrs. Klausa and Ms. Fulbrook’s mother and personal correspondence this relationship created, her insights into the bureaucratic layers of the Nazi regime would not be as intimate and revealing. This correspondence provided a glimpse into the Klausa family’s true thoughts about Hitler, the Nazi regime, and what was occurring in Bedjzin, something the revisionist history of the post-Hitler era would never have allowed to occur. Her familial relationship with the Klausa family is a very sharp double-edged sword that allows for brilliant moments of clarity in an era where everyone was obfuscating the truth while shading the entire work in elements of gray as Ms. Fulbrook allows her personal feelings to interfere with her conclusions.

Ms. Fulbrook’s research in A Small Town Near Auschwitz is extremely thorough and, as such, extremely upsetting. The stories of atrocity towards the Jewish and the Polish population are straightforwardly presented, but it does not make it any less emotional a reading experience. What makes the scenes truly horrific is that Ms. Fulbrook goes beyond descriptions of what occurred and delves into the political machinations behind such actions, as well as depicting the thought processes of those in charge of carrying out such heinous acts. The unemotional attitudes of the oppressors over the oppressed is truly terrifying and caused more than one disturbing dream in the course of reading the book.

Ms. Fulbrook presents her answers to the unsolvable question about the general population involvement in the Final Solution as fully as she can, drawing on the private correspondence between her own mother and Udo Klausa’s wife as well as the unique perspective of having met and known her chosen subject. The conclusions she draws are chilling in that they show how easily anyone can justify his or her own behavior and ignore the impact of one’s actions on others. Not only that but she showcases how simple it is to retell one’s own personal history to avoid appearing guilty in the eyes of others. A Small Town Near Auschwitz, if one can get through the tedium of reading such dense and emotionally-charged material, is an unnerving reminder of what happened to an entire population and a subtle warning of how easily it could again occur.

Acknowledgments: Thank you to NetGalley and to Oxford University Press for my review copy.

A Small Town Near Auschwitz
By Mary Fulbrook

Historian Mary Fulbrook tells the story of Udo Klausa, a civilian administrator in the small town of Bedzin.

This is a non-fiction account of events that took place during World War Two taken from memoirs, interviews, testimonies, personal letters, and other sources. For the most part this is a vivid and startling look into the actions of the Nazi group. The biggest problem I have with this novel is that the man Mary Fulbrook is writing about is the husband of her God Mother, so though she tries not to the novel itself has a tone of “It wasn’t him it was the times.” In one instance she is recounting one of her God Mother’s letters where the woman is talk about the filthy Jews and the author states that this is a normal reaction of Germans in the time. This I can understand no matter how hard you try to be objective when there is a personal connection to something you are biased by default. What drove me crazy however is that she stated that people were all too willing to discuss what had happened.... I just got back from living in Germany and I can say for an absolute fact this is not true, which leads me to wonder how exactly she got these people to talk to her and how many euros she was flashing around. Other than this it is an interesting read though there are times when it seems like the author is making excuses for a man who had a role in the atrocity that occurred. It seems like this will be one of those that you will either love or hate with no middle ground, I can see how some people will enjoy this since the author does a remarkable job in recounting historical events but I can also see how some will hate it.

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