Copy of the grim souvenir book available at “the world’s greatest battlefield”—Konzentrationslager Auschwitz—translated from Polish. Shows the crematorium; the punishment cells; the wall of death; wooden barracks; daily rations for a prisoner; piles of clothes, hair, and false legs; and other evidence of the assembly-line slaughter of an estimated 4 million people, mostly Jewish. Also covers Birkenau. Illustrated with black-and-white snapshots taken by SS guards, who took pictures like tourists enjoying a gruesome theme park. GR

Publisher: Route 66
Paperback: 120 pages
Illustrated

From their death’s-head insignia, snappy SS tank top and sports kilt, to their luxurious Russian Front greatcoats (lined with furs stripped from gassed Jews), it can’t be said the nastiest of the Nazis weren’t well-dressed. This is a detailed history, illustrated with field photos, of the uniforms and insignias of the armed units of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel der NSDAP (SS), originally formed as non-fighting “protection squads” to the Nazi bigwigs. By the time war broke out, Germany had recruited a quarter million of these well-liveried chauffeurs. Then Adolf demanded his special boys have “soldierly character… It will be necessary for our SS and police, in their own closed units, to prove themselves at the front in the same way as the army and to make blood sacrifices to the same degree as any other branch of the armed forces.” So the SS went to war. Chronicles manufacturing history, design changes, evolution of steel helmets and field caps, and shows how to spot fakes and fantasies. GR

Publisher: Hippocrene
Paperback: 160 pages
Illustrated

This book presents an argument that “the harrowing racism that led to the Holocaust in the 20th century had its roots in European colonial policy of the preceding century.” It sets Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the context of its times and traces “the legacy of the writings of European explorers and theologians, politicians and historians, from the late 18th century on, in an effort to help us understand that most terrifying of Conrad’s lines, ‘Exterminate all the brutes.’” It chronicles many infamous genocides of “lower species” and “inferior races” that hallmarked the Western world’s “progress” in the 1800s, such as: Darwin’s witnessing of the Argentine government’s slaughter of the Pampas Indians; the complete extermination by the Spanish of the Guanches of the Canary Islands; the complete extermination of the Tasmanians of the South Pacific (also witnessed by Darwin); and America’s decimation of its native tribes, cutting them down from 5 million to one-quarter million. GR

Publisher: New Press
Hardback: 179 pages
Illustrated

In 1941, a young gay boy in Nazi-occupied Strasbourg, Alsace, only 17, is summoned by the Gestapo, tortured at Gestapo headquarters, and sent to the Schirmeck-Vorbruch work camp. A haircut in the shape of a swastika, bouts of dysentry, beatings, starvation. “Monstrous” medical treatments were part of his internment: “There were half a dozen of us, bare-chested and lined up against the wall. I have very clear memories of white walls, white shirts and the laughter of the orderlies. The orderlies enjoyed hurling their syringes at us like darts at a fair. During one injection session, my unfortunate neighbor blacked out and collapsed: the needle had struck his heart. We never saw him again.” The worst was witnessing the slaughter of his young lover, who was stripped naked in front of hundreds, then had a bucket placed over his head, then was torn apart screaming by guard dogs. The bucket was used to amplify his screams. Written with “poignant dignity and simplicity.” GR

Publisher: Basic
Paperback: 208 pages
Illustrated

Kissing or embracing another man, gossip spread by neighbors or receiving a letter from a gay friend were grounds for arrest under Paragraph 175, a strengthened German sodomy law pushed through in 1935, endorsed by the SS and the Gestapo. Tagged as “degenerates” and “undesirables,” lesbians and “filthy queers” were systematically hunted down, brutalized and exterminated along with the rest of Hitler’s Aryan phobias: the Jews, Gypsies, the mentally ill. The story of a gay Austrian man who endured the death camps, forced to wear a pink triangle to identify his crime against the state. GR

Publisher: Alyson
Paperback: 120 pages
Illustrated

As many have suspected, the School Book Depository was a lousy place to put a gun, unless one was planting a patsy. “The next shot came from the Dal-Tex building… The fifth shot came from the Book Depository, possibly from the roof. The sixth and final shot would not miss. It was the one fired by a man positioned behind the picket fence… west of the corner of the fence on the grassy knoll.” This is the shot that resulted in Kennedy’s head exploding. GR

Publisher: Consolidated
Paperback: 252 pages
Illustrated

Coffee-table chronicle of the awesome architectural legacy of the Freemasons, from graveyard pyramids and sphere-shaped temples to deluxe neo-Egyptian lodge interiors. “Lurking somewhere under the conventional histories that deal with the Renaissance, Baroque and Neo-classical periods is a strange world…” That world is the Masonic world. “For a brief period in the 18th century Freemasonry was the heart of much that was enlightened, forward-looking, and promised a regeneration of society. The searches for wisdom, to rediscover antiquity, to replace superstition by reasoned philosophy, to better mankind, and to find expressions for the new age in architecture, music and in all the arts” were all conducted by men schooled in the mystic brotherhood. Hail, the all-seeing eye! GR

Publisher: Overlook
Hardback: 271 pages
Illustrated

Details mankind’s occult, religious, political, and mythological obsession with the ice-bound polar regions. Lost races, underground realms, conspiracy theories, the mystic East, UFOs and the Apocalypse are all belief systems variously tied to the shifting Poles. “Many occult systems speak of a Golden Age, associated with an ancient race that lived in the Arctic regions. Much embraced by ethnologists and Theosophists, this ‘Aryan Race’ entered the mythology of Nazi Germany with dreadful consequences.” Includes maps and drawings. GR

Publisher: Phanes
Paperback: 260 pages
Illustrated

Exploration of a fascinating mystery: How did Africa’s Dogon tribe (and others) get hold of star-system data thousands of years before Western man? (Insert weird music.) The book traces the enigma back 5,000 years to the Egyptian and Sumerian cultures. “These ancient civilizations possessed not only great wealth and learning, but also a knowledge dependent on physics and astrophysics, which they claimed was imported to them by visitors from Sirius,“ a rare double-star system. The Dogon could explain Sirius B, a White Dwarf orbiting Sirius A, but no one on Earth could see it. Is this proof the Pharaohs were visited by star creatures? (Hold weird note.) Could be. In contrast, modern astronomers only got their proof of the Sirius enigma in 1970. (Weird sustain and out.) GR

Publisher: Destiny
Paperback: 292 pages

Britain’s Society for Psychical Research provides archival material for a rethinking of precognition. If it does exist, asks the author, “can it be understood in terms of modern science? It directly contradicts the theories of classical physics—but the modern view of time and space as set out in Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity may be able to accommodate it.” From waking impressions of the Titanic sinking to experimental studies with animals, the quantum level phenomenon of “Action at a Temporal Distance” is explored. GR

Publisher: Academy Chicago
Paperback: 178 pages
Illustrated