Customer Reviews

Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union (Eighth Edition)

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An interesting book. The first section describes the gradual tightening of legal restrictions on the Jewish people of Germany. Each decree gradually stripping another layer of civil protection by defining them as second class citizens. The final legal step was to define what a Jew was, and how they no longer qualified even as a second class citizen.

The second part of the book tells the story of the same process in Poland. Each step was carefully calculated as part of the final solution of the "Jewish problem." Interesting is Heydrichs order in 1939 where it is obvious that extermination was the final goal. Also interesting, at least for me, was how clearly Hitler considered Jews and Communists one and the same. Rather, you could be a communist without being a Jew, but all communists took orders from the international Jewish conspiracy.

The final section describes the events in the Soviet Union where the Holocaust operated without any restraints. This book is about the destruction of the Jewish population so you will not find any reference to the deaths of millions of Poles, Ukranians, etc.

An interesting book. If you have minimal knowledge of the Holocaust this would give the reader a starting point. Please remember this not going to read like a novel although in its own way it is a narrative. A narrative of the destruction of the Jewish people.