The Camp Men

nside these pages you will meet over 960 infamous men – the officers of Nazi Germany's Totenkopf (Death's Head). You will encounter the 256 SS officers who worked at Dachau – the SS concentration camp that doubled as a training school for death. You will encounter twelve SS officers who served in Treblinka and the other very secret camps of Operation Reinhard – Heinrich Himmler's extermination plan for the Jews of Poland. And, you will confront the 161 SS officers who ran the largest killing center of all time – Auschwitz. These officers of the Death's Head, many of whom later served in the Waffen-SS, were not the bureaucrats who meticulously planned Adolf Hitler's Final Solution from behind a desk in Berlin, or those who quietly scheduled the trains that carried the victims to the camps. Quite the contrary; these men stood on the front-line of the Nazi war to exterminate the Jews – they poured the gas pellets, they conducted the gruesome medical experiments, they supervised the crematoria, they smelled the stench of death, they heard the screams, they ordered the guards to shoot. They were The Camp Men – and they were at the heart of darkness. The photographic section of the book, with well over one hundred photographs – a large portion previously unpublished – is the largest collection of photographs of SS camp personnel ever to appear in one work. The images come from the extensive files of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Berlin Document Center, Yad Vashem and many other institutional collections. There are additionally photographs from private sources, including almost twenty rare pictures from the Gross-Rosen camp kommandant's personal photograph album.