Holocaust: A History

by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt

Book Overview

Unrivaled in reach and scope, Holocaust illuminates the long march of events, from the Middle Ages to the modern era, which led to this great atrocity. It is a story of all Europe, of Nazis and their allies, the experience of wartime occupation, the suffering and strategies of marked victims, the failure of international rescue, and the success of individual rescuers. It alone in Holocaust literature negotiates the chasm between the two histories,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393325245
• ISBN13: 9780393325249
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.0" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Great book

I was looking for a readable, reasonably detailed overview of the Holocaust and this book fit the bill perfectly. I appreciate the "voice" of the authors, which enters the writing regularly. They don't shy away from making judgments of the masses of people who acquiesced in the early stages of the Holocaust and stood by as the final solution unfolded. As I read the book, I constantly wondered how people could do these terrible things. The one thing I would have liked to see is a little more on that question. I would have liked an overview of theories, and also a little more background on anti-semitism. One of the depressing things about the Holocaust is that so many countries were happy to go along with Hitler's war against the Jews. Perhaps one volume just can't deal with all issues...now I'm looking for a follow up that deals more with "why?"

Holocaust: A History

This is a superb, hard-to-put-down book. I found it to be well written, well organized, and, as a previous reviewer noted, meticulously footnoted. Consequently, I was surprised at what I found when I checked the source of one of the footnotes. On page 301 of the hardcover edition, the authors, critical of America's skepticism of Nazi atrocities in German-occupied Poland, state that "Time (Magazine) mockingly called the news from Poland the atrocity story of the week." Knowing that Time has an archive website and curious about this charge, I checked the footnoted source, the September 18, 1939 edition of Time (Footnote 54). What Time mocked was not allegations of Nazi atrocities but rather a United Press correspondent and German officers who had claimed that hundreds of German civilians had been killed and mutilated by retreating Poles. I don't doubt that there were some in America back then who doubted Nazi atrocities. Indeed, unfortunately a few still do. But the Time Magazine article does not support the authors' case. I had no interest in checking additional citations and I hope this was an isolated error in an otherwise outstanding book.

Holocaust: A History

Last January I began a comprhensive study of the holocaust. I was looking for a book that would provide me with an accurate overview and a good working framework to organize my study. This book provided me with all the tools I needed.It is well researched, well organized and well written.I cannot understand why anyone would call this excellent text boring or difficult to raad unless that person had little interest in the holocaust to begin with. I highly recommend this book.

The Inhuman Savagery of Man

The scholar seeking to write a comprehensive history of the Holocaust is confronted at the outset with two significant problems. Too broad a focus on the ?big picture? will tend to obscure the humanity of the individual victims who will come to seem abstract. Too narrow a focus on individual stories will, inevitably, diminish the shear scope of the horror which is really too great for the human mind to comprehend. The scholar must, therefore, try to reconcile both the larger picture and also to humanize the victims, to give them faces and names and backgrounds, to demonstrate their suffering. In this brilliant new book, which is destined to become the new standard one volume text on the Holocaust, the authors succeed brilliantly.They begin by developing the broader picture, showing how racial anti-Semitism grew in Europe and how it metastasized in Germany under Hitler. The book then follows the horrible story chronologically as the Nazis systematically remove the Jews from all aspects of German society setting the stage for genocide with the outbreak of war. Not neglected is the role played by other European countries in supporting the annihilation of European Jewry. Repeated are the familiar stories of how Denmark rescued its Jewish citizens and how France cooperated with its Nazi overlords. Not well known, however, is the fact that Romania, actually carried out its own formal program of genocide, independent of Germany, the only European country to do soThe book is meticulously footnoted and quite scholarly but the writing is always lively and riveting. It is filled with quotes and anecdotes from a number of survivors and presents their stories in detail. All aspects of the Holocaust are covered, including resistance movements, and the actions of the righteous who saved thousands of lives. No book I have read covers the harrowing details of life in the Ghetto prisons as well and as comprehensively as this one.The goal of Holocaust scholarship must be to keep the story alive. The Shoah was remains and pray to God will always be, the worst atrocity in human history. The scale of it staggers the mind. This book succeeds admirably in exposing the sheer evil while maintaining a proper reverence for the memory of the victims. It is necessary to avoid any implication of a mitigation of the horror. For example, as the authors state in the chapter on the Righteous Gentiles: It is not appropriate to say six million perished but thousands were saved by good people. It is necessary to say six million perished AND thousands were saved by good people. To understand the distinction between these two sentences is to understand the proper way to study the Holocaust. This is a book that must be read by everyone so that we should NEVER FORGET.

Overlooked history of the Holocaust

This book almost more a history of anti-semitism, the main focus being anti-semitism during the Holocaust. It deals more with why the Holocaust happened, what the conditions were in Europe that led to it, and what attitudes were like toward the Jews. It explores what conditions were like in occupied countries and how the non-Jews were treated by the Germans. This treatment by the Nazis would often reflect on whether or not the country helped the Nazis in their efforts against the Jews. Many countries would collaborate if the general population was being treated well, but then again many would collaborate if they were being treated harshly and blame the Jews as the cause. The book also deals with the various plans the Nazis came up with in their effort to find the "perfect" plan to dispose of the Jews. There is only one rather short chapter on concentration camps, the rest covers quite a lot of new ground that I haven't read before in books dealing with the Holocaust. I gave it four stars because a few times it seemed to be getting away from the main topic of the book, but all in all it's an exactly source.