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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tracing the horros of the Shoah, July 12, 2007
This review is from: The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust (Routledge Historical Atlases) (Paperback)
In this volume, Martin Gilbert, who is possibly the most prolific historian on the history of the Holocaust, traces the geographical history of the Holocaust using maps accompanied by detailed commentary to illustrate the scope and horror that took place between 1941 and 1945. Also included in this volume is a detailed account of antisemitic violence that was rife in Europe in the early 20th Century.
Gilbert painstakingly covers each region of Europe and North Africa, where Jews were targeted, interred and murdered. Gilbert gives an account of the systematic attempts to exterminate the Jews: the random killing and anti-Jewish pogroms, the forcing of Jews into ghettos, the deliberate starvation of these Jews, deportations and death camps, slave labor and mass killings.
Gilbert also enumerates the countries where many Jews fled to escape Nazi persecution. Between 1933 and 1938, 500 000 German Jews emigrated or fled abroad, including more than 33 000 to Palestine, where they joined tens of thousands of recent Jewish immigrants from Poland. After the war, 200 000 survivors of the camps immigrated to Palestine, hence, Holocaust survivors and their descendants make up a substantial part of Israel's population today.
Gilbert record the names, ages and places of birth of some specific Holocaust victims whose cases he examines. He also details lesser-known locations of the Nazi persecution such as Morocco, Libya and Tunisia which were under Nazi occupation. Every period is intensely covered, as is every geographic region where Jews suffered and died.
The atlas is supplemented with photographs, some of which are very graphic. Two important maps are placed at the end of the book estimating how many Jews from each country were murdered during the Holocaust, and how many Jews returned to their countries of birth after the war.
Through his use of maps to illustrate the destruction of European Jewry and eyewitness accounts of the Nazi atrocities, Gilbert succeeds as always in combining the recording of the larger events, with a ground eye view.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More knowledge about History's greatest Evil, May 3, 2005
This review is from: The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust (Routledge Historical Atlases) (Paperback)
One of the way the human mind learns is through ordering complex realities into diagrams and pictures and illustrations and maps. These somehow give us a sense of really comprehending what we understand only vaguely.
So these maps which tell the story of the Holocaust , from the time of initial German violence against the Jews through the time of the destruction itself, and then for the remainder, the aftermath.
In collecting this material Martin Gilbert one of the great modern historians , and one of the major historians of the Holocaust provides the reader with still more information, more means for knowing about, if not completely understanding, what is arguably the greatest act of collective Evil in human history.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very thorough facts and figures, November 26, 2004
This review is from: The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust (Routledge Historical Atlases) (Paperback)
This detailed account of horrendous facts will bring tears to the eyes of the hardest ones.
Each of the numbers reported concerns human persons with their wives, family, parents, children. Behind each figure there is a drama. It is not a book about the holocaust, it's just figures and maps. There is no human aspect in these inhuman statistics.
Ever since the Greek classic period, the ones reporting a defeat are no longer killed. Martin Gilbert is supplying a very detailed, thorough and actualized report on one of the greatest defeat of humanity. He should be praised for that.
His book doesn't cover the documents which permitted the holocaust or the proofs substantiating what is not to be proven. It simply attempts at tracing each and every deportation by the nazi (no capital N, please, they have lost such a right). This is an essential working tool for historians, if they can avoid loosing the human faces behind the figures.
I still rather work with Raul Hilberg, Richard Breitman, Walter Laqueur, Randolph Braham, Yitshak Arad, Gerald Reitlinger, Lucy Dawidowicz, Saul Friedlander, Yeshuda Bauer, John Mendelsohn, Henry Friedlander & Sybil Milton, and many other with the same approach but Martin Gilbert book is always next to each of them, it maintains a synthetic global view and it is a reference as well.
If you have an interest in the nazi mass murders, you simply cannot afford not to have Gilbert's atlas. By the way why don't we have a similar Atlas on the goulag as yet? This lack shows how Gilbert's book filled a hisorical need.
Don't be satisfied with Martin Gilbert's Atlas, but don't do without it.
People dying in the camps were begging for us to tell: Jewish or not Jewish, let's keep on telling.
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