„Schöne Zeiten“

The title refers to a caption in the scrapbook of Kurt Franz, the commandant of the Treblinka concentration camp. Underneath the heading "Those Were the Days," and reproduced here, are pictures of smiling officers at a site where some 700,000 people were exterminated in the gas chambers. To refute revisionist historians who negate the testimony of Holocaust survivors, and to disprove those Germans who said they were coerced into murdering Jews, the German authors--Klee is a journalist, Dressen a lawyer and Riess a historian--present the damning and harrowing diaries, letters, photo albums and official reports of Germans who willingly participated in the Final Solution. A member of a unit that killed 33,771 Jews in the Ukranian Babi Yar ravine boasts: "It's almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work down there." Of the annihilation of thousands of Jews in White Russia, a commander says, "The action rid me of unneccessary mouths to feed." And wagging its tail for the camera is Franz's dog, which on numerous occasions was set upon Jews to bite off their genitals.