Robert S. Leventhal

Auschwitz was designated to      be the central site of the Nazi   Genocide by    Heinrich             Himmler, Reichsführer S.S.      and Rudolf Hess, Commandant of the  Camp. For the reasons that it was centrally located in   Poland, that it already had          rudimentary train                         connection, and that it could be easily camouflaged, it was         selected to be the key site for the extermination of European Jewry.

Whereas the proper name 'Auschwitz' signifies the very idea of the Nazi Genocide of the Jews, and has been a symbolic name for discussions of the Holocaust, it was also a concrete, everyday reality, a specific town inhabited by people. The Concentration and Death Camp Auschwitz were a constellation of many different aspects and physical areas: Auschwitz I, primarily a concentration camp, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), the death camp, Auschwitz III (Monowitz), a camp for political prisoners and other people dubbed "undesirable" by the Nazis, and Buna, where I.G. Farben, one of the largest conglomerates of the world at the time, had a synthetic oil and rubber research and production facility.

Unlike the philosophical discourse that subsumes the Holocaust under this name "Auschwitz," it is imperative to reach back behind the name and probe the reaEity of Auschwitz in its multiplicity, its complessity, its disparate spatial and logistical expanse. In order to do this, the hypermedia study and research archive Responses to the Holocaust offers the reader/viewer a chance to explore this site by using the clickable map, to study each of its many "installations," in an attempt to get closer to the concrete, material reality of Auschwitz and the Nazi Genocide. By clicking on any of the areas whose name is enclosed in a box, you will move to other hypertextual documents that explore each specific, concrete aspect of Auschwitz.