Vanishing simplicial volume for certain affine manifolds

Abstract

We show that closed aspherical manifolds supporting an affine structure, whose holonomy map is injective and contains a pure translation, must have vanishing simplicial volume. This provides some further evidence for the veracity of the Auslander Conjecture. Along the way, we provide a simple cohomological criterion for aspherical manifolds with normal amenable subgroups of $\pi_1$ to have vanishing simplicial volume. This answers a special case of a question due to Lück.