"'Work Makes Free': The Hidden Cultural Meaning of the Holocaust" uses the methods of symbolic anthropological analysis in an attempt to explain what previously has been considered "inexplicable": the form of Nazi antisemitism and its culmination in the industrial mass murder of Europe's Jews (the latter as epitomized by the motto "Work Makes Free" on the gateway to Auschwitz).

Countering current postmodernist trends, the primary undertaking of this study is to reveal the symbolic-historical nexus of form, meaning and practice within which the death camps were lodged. Positing the instrumental role played by genocidal antisemitism in the millenarian transformation of German self and society, "'Work Makes Free'" begins with the phenomenological form of the death camp itself, tracing its entangled, generative threads back asymmetrically into the more complex and diffuse historical and sociocultural world(s) from which they were spun.

The terms of the transformational process implicit to Nazi millenarianism and the Holocaust are elucidated first by exploring the symbolic meanings and pragmatic implications of antisemitism in the formative early modern period. The evolution of these meanings in step with the development of an alienated capitalist culture in the nineteenth century is then examined.

Utilizing (in addition to conventional historical materials) a wide spectrum of cultural forms through which the social world is embodied, the constituent cultural elements making up the death camp are next identified and examined, each in turn, within the broader context of Nazism's widespread programs of social transformation. The strands of analysis are then brought together to explain the startling and perverse cultural forms through which Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz itself were constituted.

The study concludes by returning to the motto Arbeit macht frei in order finally to reveal its deepest ideological significance as well as its implicit relationship to the brutal practice of genocide as perpetrated against the Jews of Europe.