The Auschwitz Kommandant: A Daughter’s Search for the Father She Never Knew

The Auschwitz Kommandant is the story of the author’s search for the truth about her father, a memoir of her journey of discovery into one of the bleakest periods in European history.

Barbara U. Cherish’s upbringing under the Nazi regime was one of relative wealth and comfort. But her father’s senior position in the Nazi Party meant that she and her brothers and sisters lived on a knife edge. In 1943, the year that she was born, he became kommandant of perhaps the most infamous of all the concentration camps: Auschwitz. The author tells her father’s story with clarity and without judgement, detailing both his relationship with his family and the very separate life he led as a senior officer of the SS. Captured by the US Army at the end of the war, he was held at Dachau and Nuremberg before being extradited to Poland. He was tried in the ‘Auschwitz Trial’ at Krakow, found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and executed in January 1948.

A unique insider’s view of the dark heart of the Third Reich, The Auschwitz Kommandant is also the tragic tale of a family torn apart, and will open the eyes of even the most well-read historian.