GLENN BURGESS suggests that, despite his record in Spain, Orwell’s enduring commitment to socialist revolution underpins his late novels
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Death camp memorials of Dachau, Mauthausen and Majdanek
‘Let our fate be a warning to you’ is cut into the stone of Majdanek Mausoleum a timely reminder of what may come in the wake of racial hate and xenophobia
The Dachau concentration camp memorial by Yugoslav sculptor and Holocaust survivor Nandor Glid
[Galvin/flickr/Creative Commons] 
CHRISTOPHER POLLARD explains how and why neoliberalism adopted the racist agenda common to the populist right of today
SYLVIA HIKINS recommends a sweeping survey of the world's biggest desert and the people who live there
GUILLERMO THOMAS is persuaded by a scathing critique of the Church of England and its embeddedness in imperialism
MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Materialists, Unmoored, Together, and Bambi: A Tale of Life in The Woods
TONY BURKE revels in the publication of previously unreleased tracks by the great US folksinger
GORDON PARSONS endures heavy rock punctuated by Shakespeare, and a delighted audience
ON SATURDAY January 27 1945 — 76 years ago tomorrow — the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, in Nazi-occupied Poland, was liberated by the Soviet army.
There were 27 main concentration camps set up by the Nazi regime and in them over 1.6 million people were incarcerated and many exterminated. The inmates comprised those who didn’t conform to the Nazi concept of humanity: Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, socialists, trade unionists and those with disabilities. The nazi programme of mass killing of ‘undesirables’ was the world’s most comprehensive and devastating attempt to establish an elite race of supermen and women.
Only belatedly, decades after the war’s end, did the former West German state erect any monuments at all to the victims of fascism. Up until 1995 there was no official research into the history of the concentration camps. This was hardly surprising, as many former Nazis were soon reoccupying their former posts in West Germany even before the flames of war had been extinguished.
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