with ruins and piles of corpses still piling up in the wasteland after the blitzkrieg (the author uses this name to describe the Invasion of Poland, also known as the September Campaign). Astonishing misrepresentations can be found in the chapter on the liberation of Auschwitz. The reader will learn, among other things, that the Russians and the British liberated the camp. In one scene, a British soldier recalls his experiences at the supposedly previously liberated Bergen-Belsen camp (actually liberated in mid-April 1945, almost three months after Auschwitz), while another passage suggests that his next objective will be to capture Berlin (which lies in a straight line about 250 km east of Bergen-Belsen). It would follow that the British advancing from the west (interestingly, in Matthews' book, the other western Allies, including, for instance, the Americans, do not feature at all) passed through the entire territory of the Reich before apparently turning back to the west to stage the final capture of the German capital.
One chapter describes the visit of Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich to KL Auschwitz, during which Polish partisans made a rather inept attempt to assassinate the two dignitaries. From the descriptions, it can be concluded that this action supposedly took place in the second half of the summer of 1942, when in fact, Heydrich was already dead, having been killed in Prague in May 1942.
The author seems to neglect the fact that the Second World War was a dynamic process but instead presents it as an unchanging phenomenon over time. The content is characterised not so much by dating errors but by descriptions of events occurring when they could not have happened. Thus, the scene set in January 1940 makes reference to the Germans shooting Russian prisoners of war (their de facto allies at the time). The same temporal framework appears for the Auschwitz camp with its predominantly Jewish prisoners (actually established in June 1940 for Polish prisoners), the sub-camp at Wiśnica (the network of sub-camps commenced in 1941), the women's camp (was actually established at Auschwitz in March 1942), and the crematoria and gas chambers (the first makeshift gas chamber was opened at Auschwitz in late 1941; large-scale mass extermination began in the first quarter of 1942, and it was only then that multiple transports of Jews began arriving at the camp). The author does not devote a single word of reflection to the question of whether and how it would have been possible to set up a vast concentration camp, to design and build the gas chambers and crematoria, to draw up plans for the extermination of the Jews in its practical and logistical dimensions, and to put these plans into practice in just four months (from the outbreak of war).
The section describing January 1940 also features Dr Mengele, who began his service at Auschwitz in mid-1943. And for the fictional camp commandant, he refers to the Treblinka death camp statistics from the "previous year" (i.e., 1939?), whereas the camp was established in 1942. We also find the ludicrous information that camp inmates have not washed for four years. In the backdrop of all the camp events, from January 1940 almost to the end of its existence, is the mass extermination of Hungarian Jews. Indeed, Hungarian nationals were the most numerous national group among the Jews murdered in KL Auschwitz; however, due to German-Hungarian relations, their deportation to Auschwitz did not begin until the spring of 1944. By the autumn, some 430,000 women, men and children had been deported. The magnitude of this crime is all the more striking when one realises that most of the 330,000 or so murdered in the gas chambers immediately after arriving at the camp died in just two months - from May to July 1944, six months before the liquidation of the gas chambers and the liberation of KL Auschwitz.