Customer Reviews

The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When one of the world's most eminent historians takes on the single most amazing phenomenon of the century, the Holocaust, it gives one pause for thought. So here we have Sir Martin Gilbert, a noted Holocaust authority, writing masterfully about the events leading up to and including the systematic persecution, deportation and murder of the Jews of Europe. His stirring and singular narrative is regularly punctuated by a number of poignant and shocking eyewitness accounts of many who lived through those numbing events. The test is extremely approachable and easy to read, so that the non-historian can appreciate the breadth and scope of his recounting of the events during the 12-year reign of terror levied by the National Socialists in Nazi Germany.

His approach is chronological, much like that employed in his best-selling three volume series on the 20th century. While he relies heavily on established secondary sources for his documentation, the power of his prose and his well-organized approach makes this an entertaining and educational tome to venture into. Although nowhere near as comprehensive as some other tomes such as Klaus Fischer's "History Of An Obsession", he does trace the centuries' long tradition of anti-Semitism culminating in the official state sanctioned approach codified in the institutionalized Nuremberg laws. In all this, Gilbert brilliantly employs survivor's recollections to paint the atrocities in the hues and colors of real human beings, ordinary and identifiable individuals caught in the insanity of the Third Reich. Furthermore, he pursues their individual identities and humanity by giving the reader information on the postwar futures of these people.

So much has been written about the Holocaust that it is difficult to imagine much new or novel to arise some fifty years after the end of the war. Yet the stage always remains open for the unusual display of finely crafted historical perspectives and brilliantly executed prose. The brilliance in this dazzling book is, as Oscar Schindler would have said, in the presentation. Although I have read a number of other books about these times and events that were more detailed, more graphic, or more comprehensive, this is without a doubt the single most impressive, cohesive, and authoritative volume I have read to date regarding the Holocaust in its enormity, and placed in an understandable and comprehensible context. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in owning the single best one-volume book summarizing and explaining the realities of the Holocaust.

The more people hear about the Holocaust in our Holocaust-drenched culture, the less they seem to know about it. Most people's understanding of the Holocaust reduces to simplistic abstractions and cliches, particularly the notion that the worst thing about the Nazi war against the Jews was that it was impersonal and bureaucratic. This book is the antidote to all that. By tracing in specific detail, from month to month and year to year, what the Nazi regime actually did to the Jewish communities of Europe that fell under its power, Martin Gilbert gives the reader a more vivid and concrete sense of the Holocaust than can be found in any other book (or museum) on the subject. Contrary to the focus of the popular mind on Auschwitz and gas chambers, the Holocaust did not consist of one event or one crime. It consisted of innumerable, specific crimes, in a steadily mounting unleashing of cruelty that only an epic-length treatment such as Mr. Gilbert's could adequately portray. This is an indispensable book that will forever change your understanding of one of history's central events.

Martin Gilbert's the Holocaust is the most comprehinsive and in depth work I have read on this subject, and why it gets 5 stars is because of the very personal nature of this book. Mr. Gilbert reverts the numbers back into real people. When reading other books on the Holocaust I found myself being deluged with these massive numbers of atrocities until they began to become abstracted and unreal, but Mr. Gilbert's account is so detailed and filled with personal accounts that every page fills you with a greater sense of the reality and the scope of this tragedy. Instead of a clinical account of numbers, this book has personal and eyewitness accounts throughout. He never lets you forget that these were real people with families, friends and real lives. This is a gut-wrenching read that forces you to look into the darkest reaches of human nature and see just how vicious human biengs can be to one another. A Diary of Anne Frank on a grand scale.

This is likely to be the standard history of the holocaust. It is meticulously researched and documented.

A study of the systematic destruction of European Jewry. A masterpiece chronicling an attempt at modern day genocide.

Jews were subjected to horrific, inhumane suffering and murder in ghettoes, slave labour camps, concentration camps and forced marches. Atrocities that were well documented by the Nazi murder-machine.

A chilling but essential possession and reference that needs to be read and re-read.

I have visited many of the sites referred to, indeed most of the still remaining concentration camps in Poland.

With the alarming increase in anti-Semitism now prevalent worldwide, especially again in Europe, books such as this are crucial, indispensable tools that must prevent us from allowing society to follow this path again.

Everyone with any interest in the 20th century soon has to come to grips with the Holocaust. Whether you believe that the SS who murdered civilians were automatons acting under orders, or were psychotics, or were brainwashed by Nazi ideology, one has to come to some conclusion.

Martin Gilbert's book is an inside view of the Holocaust. There is very little theoretical material here, but only a narrative history of the genocides. Because he appears to cover as many massacres and shootings as possible, it is quite numbing to read this book. At first massacres are relatively sparse, though still horrific. As time goes on, the Einsatzgruppen step up the tempo, until sometimes it seems that every paragraph of the book describes a different massacre. There might be a shooting of ten thousand Jews at a small ghetto in Poland, or the extermination of an entire village community in Lithuania, or a shipment of Jews from Paris to Auschwitz.

The sheer number of massacres is really disturbing, and really forces one to consider how anyone could go from massacre to massacre like that, every couple of days, shooting innocent civilians, even children. Surely they cannot all have been psychotics? Many of these killers appear to have had normal backgrounds and certainly did not come from asylums.

Read this book with a strong stomach, and make your own conclusions on how such a horror could have happened.

There are no words to describe the Evils written about in this book. But the words Martin Gilbert has do describe with historical precision the destruction of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis and their various allies. The book is difficult and painful to read because of the horrible stories it tells. And as one reviewer on Amazon has said this is a record not of one crime but of thousands of crimes done every day, not of one cruelty but of millions of cruelties. One of the features of this historical accounting which may seem to some to disturb the flow of the overall historical narrative but which to me seemed to give tremendous weight and power of the book is the account of individual lives, the stories of those people who actually suffered and went through the Shoah. Naming of names in this way, and telling the stories of the ' little people' seems to me to give the account a human strength that more general accounts lack.
This work is as I said very difficult to read because of its painful subject matter. Reading it one certainly learns about ' man's inhumanity to man' the cruelty Mankind is capable of. One learns to know how certain specific peoples seem to display special tendencies for that cruelty. One learns about the worst chapter in all of Jewish history , and of the surviving remnant of it.
Who wishes to know and understand the full character of human history must read this book, or one like it.
G-d help us all.

I don't even know how to begin a review about such a book, which in turn is about such a terrifying horror in world History. The Nazi's "Final Solution" is one of the very rare "first's" in history (if I'm not mistaken); there is no precedent to it. Martin Gilbert's monumental book (over 800 painful pages) covers the whole history of Jews under Nazi rule from the first segregating laws to the death marches, and even beyond the end of the war. I had a book by Gilbert before - on the first World War - and I was not disappointed to find the same qualities in this book: a meticulous work of research and a precision that shows the author's concern about the exact truth of the matters at hand.

Among those things I like with this author is that he shares the floor, literally. He constantly give others room, by means of quotes and else, and thus he carries those voices over to us; and that way we get to read the testimonies of direct witnesses and victims of the Holocaust. Because of that the book brings you very close to the events in that it comes directly from the sufferers. I especially appreciate the mix of anecdotes and details from direct witnesses combined with a general narration of the overall situation. You get points of view from different scales; you get to know what happened on an individual level, and also on the general situation. The author always emphasises on the human level and that is a strong point of this author.

On the whole, I think this book made me learn about everything I wanted to know on the Shoah, as far as the historical basics are concerned; but what makes this work stand out is the effectiveness with which it portrays the Holocaust. It is a very difficult book to read because of that: it is hard to truly seize the reality of what happened and digest it. There are numerous stories in this book that are horrifyingly shocking. Literally every page is oozing blood. For instance, it never occured to me that you could "tear" a baby apart. Another shocking thing is the treatment of children. You will find out in this book that the most "effective" way to kill a child (while sparing a bullet) is to take him or her by the legs and to smash him or her against a wall or the ground. This happened over and over, and if my memory does not fail me, this method was also used on South Americans by the conquistadores. There are countless such stories gathered in this book, and before you get to read it, be sure that you can take it. One thing that may help you is that so much of all of what happened seems so unreal that sometimes you just find yourself unable to seize the reality of it, and you have to think twice to just truly see what you're reading.

That is another strong point of Gilbert: he does not back off before any atrocity. I think the worst things I ever heard of are in this book. From the systematic shootings to the gas-chambers; every step is exposed and with it are a number of stories told by witnesses - those also include Nazis occasionally.

I find it difficult to write a review on this book given that it is hard to dissociate the book from the events; I mean, as far as the book per se is concerned, it is a major work. If you want a book about the Holocaust, this definitely will be it. This will take you through the Shoah from beginning to end, through the ghettos to the gas-chambers.

Since I don't know exactly how to structure my poor review, and that I don't make plans beforehand, here is a short unexhaustive list of some of the things you will find in the book:

- A detailed exposing of Nazi methods of mass murder (most details are usually provided by witnesses, except for things they could not know); those methods are:
- Shootings. (Death, or at least injury, by bullet, followed by burial in large pits; often people were not dead after the first shot, many were buried alive, while others were shot again as SS saw them moving among the heap of corpses.)
- The Gas-vans. Those were the ancestors of the gas-chambers; they were the first means to attempt mass murder more effectively and more economically. Exhaust gas was used first and then they switched to zyklon B.
- The Gas-chambers. The ultimate mass-killing machines. People were then buried in similar mass graves as those who died from the shootings; this changed when the Nazis realised they would not win the war, so in order to erase traces, the Nazis began to unearth those corpses and burn them to ashes in crematoriums, where all subsequent victims were to be burned to ashes too. The bones were then ground so nothing would remain.
- The Ghettos were also a means to kill, though more "subtly" since people died mostly of starvation, except when Nazis killed Jews randomly or as reprisals for the smallest of offenses.

- The condition of Jews during WW2 is made very clear by Gilbert. You come to understand that it wasn't the Nazis only who wanted Jews to die; the surrounding antisemitism is brilliantly put forward by the author, and I say brilliantly because it is very painful to read.

I stop my list here but there is a lot more that I could mention. In conclusion I would say that this book is likely the standard reference to the history of the Holocaust, not that I have any particular knowledge in History, but I found this work thorough and painstakingly meticulous. You are given all the numbers, dates, sources, and names you could ask for. However difficult it is to convey the horrors of these events, I think Martin Gilbert does the best job one could do.

The mass of information given is enormous but you're never lost; the year is printed on top of each page and Gilbert thoroughly follows the chronology of the events in the telling of the Holocaust. Almost day by day you move further into this dark episode of our History. I don't know what I could say to make this review a little bit better. If you want to learn about the Holocaust, and are unafraid of the truth, however horrific, then I strongly recommend this monument of History. It is a painful read and you won't finish it without emotional cost, but I believe such a read to be important, not only to remember, but also to prevent. I know this is the cliché about it, but it's true: people were equally incredule of the systemica elimination of a people back then as we are today. Germany was a peak of civilisation back then, and it prevented nothing; no one, not even the very victims, could believe it, until there could be no doubts left. The constant deception of the Nazis is exposed very well by the author and you can see it and how it works throughout the accounts given to us by witnesses. That is a system I like in Gilbert's work: you have both the view from outside and that from inside, and from insiders.

A terrible book that should be read by everyone.

Of the thirty books I have read on this subject, this one book tells the reader most of what they would ever want to know about this historic event. The book is logically laid out from the seeds of antisemitism to the "Final Solution." After reading this book, I visited some of the places mentioned and felt the power of these places through Gilbert's words. An outstanding read!

A review excerpt on the dust cover claimed, a book that will be read with "bleeding eyes".

One would not expect a text giving a comprehensive history of the Holocaust to be a light read. Never-the-less, on turning the final page my eyes were indeed bleeding, my mind numbed and my emotions heart-fallen for this is was a tour de force, an unrelenting synopsis of over ten terrible years spanning the onset of the Third Reich to the post war recovery of Europe, guided by the hand of a master historian with an impecable drive to follow every contention with a evidential fact.

The first death at the hands of Nazi anti-semitism in the streets is recorded so matter of factly that one merely acknowledges the act as would reading a crime in today's newspaper. By the end of 900 pages though, where the death of one has evolved into thousands per event, one seems rightly agahst at the breadth of what started with the Nuremburg Laws had brought about. Crime had morphed into sheer terror.

A superb historical account covering the entirety of all events and theatres that would collectively become known as the "Holocaust".

An insight into the centuries old culture of European anti-semitism precedes a thorough introduction to the rise of Nazism, the SS and the Third Reich. The Nuremburg Laws, the activities of the SA, the Kristelnacht all merge into the crossing of the Polish border, the invasions of the West, then the Soviet Union and the ride of the Einsatzgruppen in their wake. The collaboration of nationalists, the mass grave shooting pits, the construction of the killing factories, the pillaging of the Ghettos swirl amidst the din of eye witness accounts.

For this reader, the total shock came as the tide of VE Day had swept the once conquered lands, where the absolute destruction of villages and cities may have erradicated a cultural heritage in architectural beauty but amazingly not that of Eastern Europe's base anti-semitism.

The plight of the Polish Jews surviving the camps, seeking a way home, tears one apart as the revelation becomes apparent that not only were the most nationalistic of non-Jewish Poles pleased to be rid of their Nazi overlords but equally of the millions of their Jewish breatheren just the same.

For the author, the extent of the horror came with the story of the relentless aim to liquidate Europe's Jewish children.

A work that can not be put down, begging to be read as an epitaph to the times - yet, encouraging in its historical breadth and attention to fact based detail.

Highly recommended to general readers seeking both an account of the Rise of the Third Reich and the methodical implementation of the precepts expounded in Mein Kampf. Military historians seeking to supplement their knowledge of the Allgemeine and Waffen SS will also find this an immense resource.

For those with a self hurting desire to know the whole horrible truth about the bloody act of social engineering known to history as The Holocaust, this book is one of the best eye opening and stomach churning works on the subject.

Having such a desire, this was one of the first books on the subject I purchased and read from beginning to end.

It was very painful to read. Every horrible event well described without being graphic or overdone. Better than diet pills for killing one's appetite. All the horrible things that happened.

How did something as this happen?

Read this book and learn.