How long does it take to read Auschwitz?
A New History
Auschwitz by Laurence Rees takes about 6 hours to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours
A weekend read
First published 2005. 327 pages, about 89,925 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 45 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Published for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- a devastating and surprising account of the most infamous death camp the world has ever known. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the site of the largest mass murder in human history. Yet its story is not fully known. In Auschwitz, Laurence Rees reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews with Auschwitz survivors and Nazi perpetrators who speak on the record for the first time. Their testimonies provide a portrait of the inner workings of the camp in unrivalled detail -- from the techniques of mass murder, to the politics and gossip mill that turned between guards and prisoners, to the on-camp brothel in which the lines between those guards and prisoners became surprisingly blurred. Rees examines the strategic decisions that led the Nazi leadership to prescribe Auschwitz as its primary site for the extinction of Europe's Jews -- their "Final Solution." He concludes that many of the horrors that were perpetrated in Auschwitz were driven not just by ideological inevitability but as a "practical" response to a war in the East that had begun to go wrong for Germany. A terrible immoral pragmatism characterizes many of the decisions that determined what happened at Auschwitz. Thus the story of the camp becomes a morality tale, too, in which evil is shown to proceed in a series of deft, almost noiseless incremental steps until it produces the overwhelming horror of the industrial scale slaughter that was inflicted in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. - Publisher.
Subjects: Auschwitz (Concentration camp), Interviews, Holocaust survivors, War criminals, History, Konzentrationslager
