Introduction
This history of Auschwitz offers the reader a fully rounded picture of the camp from its early days as a detention camp for Polish political prisoners to the pivotal role that Auschwitz played in Hitler’s attempt to annihilate European Jewry.

Taking the form of daily entries (hence, ‘Auschwitz Diary’), all aspects of the development of the camp itself and the lives of those who lived and died there are examined - the experiments in mass gassing and the construction of the crematoria and gassing facilities; the expansion of the camp to become a major supplier of industrial slave labour; the establishment of the Auschwitz agricultural estate; the growth of resistence organisations within the camp; the use of prisoners in medical experiments; and a comprehensive survey of Jewish transports from all over Europe.

The manuscript also places Auschwitz into the broader context of other major events of the Holocaust - the development of Reich anti-Jewish policies leading up to the Wannsee Conference; the establishment of the other death camps; the operation of the Einsatzkommando mobile killing squads in Russia; the establishment (and liquidation) of the Jewish ghettos throughout Europe; and a survey of the planning within all occupied territories for deporting the Jews to the east.

Drawing on source material as varied as survivor testimony, architectural blueprints, war crimes tribunal evidence and testimony of accused, published archive material and scholarly works, what I have achieved with this ‘diary’ structure is to present a series of snapshots of events, juxtaposed as they are from countless perspectives, in a clear chronological structure that give the reader a real appreciation of how it was possible - in the space of three and a half years - for the SS to transform a derelict set of old Austrian army barracks into the greatest human slaughterhouse in history.

The website
As I could get no publisher to take an interest in my manuscript - I thought it was a pity that all my research had no audience - and so I began to put together an edited version as a web project. The project is reasonably well advanced and I hope that, sometime in 2007, I can finally get it online.

A letter to The Times
Following the conviction of David Irving on Holocaust denial charges in Vienna, The Times printed a letter from me on 22nd February 2006 regarding the importance of archive evidence when it comes to historical truth. I reprint it here.

Sir,

The gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz and the deliberate Nazi policy of exterminating European Jewry are not matters of opinion - they are matters of historical fact. Residing in the archives are tens of thousands of documents detailing the application of The Final Solution - from the architects’ blueprints for the Auschwitz crematoria showing both changing rooms and gas chambers; memos from Reich security police conducting round-ups of Jews in cities all over Europe; railway timetables detailing a steady stream of transports from these cities, destination Auschwitz; even a substantial set of records of these transports arriving at Auschwitz escaped the frenzied burning of camp documents as the Russians got ever closer to liberating the camp: with detailed notes about how many arrived in each transport and how many of these entered camp as prisoners and how many were sent straight to the gas chambers. We also have the transcripts of a number of important War Crimes Tribunals in which both documentary and eyewitness evidence was successfully used to convict some of the perpetrators. We have the memoirs of Auschwitz Lagerführer, Rudolf Höss. We have masses of photographic and film evidence. And we have volumes of survivor testimony so detailed and compendious that its veracity is compelling.

Any man claiming to be a historian who chooses to ignore compelling archive evidence in a futile attempt to rewrite history that matches his prejudices is a bad historian and should be exposed as such. Having been so exposed, if he continues to claim the earth is flat, I believe he should be allowed to do so. We don’t have to buy his books or take him seriously in any way. Let him eke out his disgraced reputation on the fringes of society rather than giving him and those of like mind the argument that he was censored - so he must have been right.

yours faithfully

Jeremy Crick
Wolstanton, Staffordshire

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/debate/letters/article733375.ece