This book is must-read for anybody with more than a passing interest in the Holocaust. I read the one volume paperback 'student' edition years ago which presents much of the same information while omitting some of the detail and none of the footnotes. The more casual reader will want to pick up that edition instead of this three volume set.
Readers who like emotion and drama served up with their Holocaust history will probably want to look elsewhere. There are plenty of other books that provide that.
But if you want nitty gritty facts and figures on every aspect of the Holocaust, this is a book for you. Raul Hilberg has done an amazing job of consolidating and synthesizing various sources of information to help us understand the process of the Jewish destruction. Raul Hilberg was the first scholar to tackle this subject in depth and this work still stands today as THE standard work. Although it was last updated in 1985 and new documents that had been languishing in archives in former Warsaw Pact countries have become available following the fall of the Soviet Union, the conclusions Raul Hilberg drew in this third edition still stand.
One aspect of the Holocaust that could use some improvement is that Hilberg sees the Holocaust as an almost inevitable final stage to a thousand years of European antisemitism. He suggests that the Jewish suffering in the diaspora is qualitatively different than the suffering that every minority group has experienced when living among a stronger majority. In the process, he reinforces the long discredited canard that there was, is, and always will be some sort of Christian conspiracy to kill all the Jews. This belief is by no means unique to Hilberg and it doesn't detract from the value of the rest of his work.
This is a book that most people will never read more than once but will refer to over and over again. If you're a person who would say 'holocaust studies' when asked about your hobbies or interests, this is a book you should own. If you say you're a 'holocaust scholar' and you don't own this book, you better hope your mother never finds out.
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Excellent book, terrible print
The book is a seminal work, and very well researched and written.The print of the book, however, is horrendous. There are numerous pages where the print is so crooked it nearly runs off the page; there is a random title page in the middle of a chapter; though I understand a paperback cover is going to be less sturdy, this is peeling and poorly made.
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"aleksandra_savr2"
Extraordinary and one of the best
Reviewed in Australia on April 2, 2023
