DEATH BOOKS OF AUSCHWITZ By Laurinda Keys The Canberra Times Friday 23 June, 1995 FRANKFURT, Thursday: The publication yesterday of the _Death Books from Auschwitz_, the first generally available listing of the names of some of the people who died at the Nazi death camp, depicts the macabre bureaucracy of mass murder. "This publication contains death records of murdered prisoners, based on the partially preserved original death books which the Auschwitz concentration camp authorities compiled with incredible meticulousness," Poland's Foreign Minister, and Auschwitz survivor, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski writes in the foreword. The Nazis listed 400,000 prisoners as having been in the camp, but more than one million, most of them Jews, were sent directly from the trains to the gas chambers, their names never recorded. The SS commanders did record the details of 69,000 people who died at the camp. Specifics of the doomed prisoners' births, home towns, and families were recorded, along with the death dates. But then they fudged on the cause of death. These records were used in 1964 in the prosecution of war criminals and then were buried in a KGB archive in Moscow until 1991. In February of that year, researchers from the Auschwitz Museum got permission from Soviet authorities to examine the records. Within a year, the new Russian authorities had handed over the documents. Several years of editing, comparison with other data, and research in Poland, Germany and Israel produced the volumes offered by Publisher K.G. Saur in English, German and Polish. Associated Press
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