Customer Reviews

Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation

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"In what way have we sinned, that we should be treated worse than animals? Hunted from place to place, cold, filthy and in rags, we wander about like gypsies and in the end are destroyed like vermin!"

The origin of this lamentation-- perhaps a victim of the Holocaust? No, rather an excerpt for a letter written by a German soldier on the Western Front in November of 1915. I found this book very interesting as far as it went. Omer Bartov sets the stage for the argument that the experience of the Great War set the paradigm which made the Holocaust possible. Personally I've suspected this for a long time and Bartov mentions many similarities between trench warfare and the death camps. Less pervasive is his description of the perpetrators as "frustrated pacifists". In addition Bartov has interesting comments concerning the way that industrial killing in general and the Holocaust in particular are commemorated. In the end however I thought he could have carried his main argument further, but all in all a worthwhile book and definitely needed in this field.