The crushing number of murders - over 1,200,000 of them - the overwhelming scale of the crime, and the vast, abandoned site of ruined chimneys and rusting barbed wire isolate Auschwitz from us. We think of it as a concentration camp closed in on itself, separated from the rest of the world by night and fog.

In the 1940s, however, this epicenter of the Holocaust was located at the edge of a town that had become the focus of a Germanization program that included ruthless ethnic cleansing, massive industrial investment, and comprehensive urban construction.

Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present elucidates how the prewar ordinary town of Auschwitz became Germany's most lethal killing site step by step and in stages: a transformation wrought by human beings, mostly German and mostly male. Who were the men who conceived, created, and constructed the killing facility? What were they thinking as they inched their way to iniquity?

Using the hundreds of architectural plans for the camp that the Germans, in their haste, forgot to destroy, as well as blueprints and papers in municipal, provincial, and federal archives, Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt show that the town of Auschwitz and the camp of that name were the centerpiece of Himmler's ambitious project to recover the German legacy of the Teutonic Knights and Frederick the Great in Nazi-ruled Poland.

Analyzing the close ties between the 700-year history of the town and the five-year evolution of the concentration camp in its suburbs, van Pelt and Dwork offer an absolutely new and compelling interpretation of the origins and development of the death camp at Auschwitz. And drawing on oral histories of survivors, memoirs, depositions, and diaries, the authors explore the ever more murderous impact of these changes on the inmates daily lives.