La destrucción de los judíos europeos

The Destruction of the European Jews #1-3

by Raul Hilberg, Cristina Piña Aldao (Translator)

La destrucción de los judíos europeos se incrusta en el mismísimo centro del proyecto de la modernidad europea y del modelo civilizador occidental, y desestabiliza de forma muy profunda los fundamentos mismos del proyecto social, político y cultural de nuestras sociedades. En este sentido, las aproximaciones habituales en torno al capitalismo como sistema económico insuperable, al liberalismo como ideología de consenso de las sociedades occidentales, al nacionalismo como forma de identidad social, a la democracia formal como modo de gobierno predominante y al cristianismo como legado religioso irrecusable de Occidente deben efectuarse bajo unas condiciones de validación crítica mucho más estrictas y exigentes para explicar la razón de ser de la Shoah. La destrucción de los judíos europeos sigue siendo todavía una pregunta histórica capital en la coyuntura política actual, y su genealogía, una tarea intelectual primordial para comprender la política de nuestros días. En este libro, Raul Hilberg efectúa una reconstrucción formidable y asombrosa del abigarrado conjunto de políticas, iniciativas y comportamientos que hicieron posible la destrucción de una parte considerable de la población europea apelando a su carácter étnico o cultural inasimilable, o a su imposible integración social en la comunidad racial nacional. Hilberg explica, con una minuciosidad y una exhaustividad fascinantes, cómo en el proceso de destrucción de los judíos europeos concurrieron las prácticas y los saberes más depurados de las sociedades europeas, de qué forma participaron innumerables estratos de la población y de los grupos profesionales presentes en las mismas, y mediante qué mecanismos su coordinación fue articulada por un Estado abocado a la guerra global cuyo funcionamiento se hizo incontrolable para la propia sociedad que lo había instituido.

Reseña en RTVE.es

Genres: History, Holocaust, Nonfiction, World War II, Politics, Jewish, War

1456 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final Solution.

Reviews

[Karl Jorgenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the encyclopedia of the Holocaust. It is dense, detailed, documented, and as unreadable as the Warren Report for its sparse and unadorned style. Do you want to know which Nazi was in charge of labor allocation in Central Poland in 1943? You can find it here. Who was the SS regional commander in charge of transport in the Reichsprotektorate? Found here. I can't imagine a more comprehensive, factual listing of the people, places, actions, monetary values, and victims.
Beyond this all-inclusive factual listing, the author offers a theory for the Holocaust, or at least a theory for why the Nazis had little trouble killing everyone they wanted to kill. Hilberg suggests that Jews have been persecuted for centuries, and have evolved a turn-the-other-cheek philosophy of giving in to oppressors until they go away. This didn't work with the Nazis.
Beyond the idea that Hilberg is putting some of the blame on the victims, his theory seems wrong from other historical evidence. Stalin killed tens of millions of Ukrainians and others without a struggle. Mao Tse-Tung murdered millions of educated Chinese, who did not fight back. Pol Pot wiped out the intelligentsia of Cambodia, with no resistance. It seems to me that the other examples of genocide involve communities with no history of persecution, who none-the-less behave as European Jews did. Fighting back is impossible without the means to fight back.

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive description of how the Nazis went about murdering 6,000,000 Jews ... solving unprecedented logistical problems with frightening German efficiency ... equally inventive at explaining why the Jews had to die and thus why their behavior was necessary and patriotic.

I do not remember any other book which has cast such a pall of sadness over me, as I read page after page with descriptions like these ...

... Hoss concluded after visiting Treblinka … carbon monoxide was not efficient … instead at Auschwitz he introduced a quicker-working hydrogen cyanide - Zyklon …

... bodies buried in mass grave decomposed … corpses swelled … a black, evil-smelling mass oozed out … bodies, covered with maggots, were disinterred for burning in pits … new plans were developed for ovens to accompany gas chambers

... from the moment the doors of a train opened, all but a few of the deportees had only 2 hours to live

... (even in the midst of war) ... no Jew was left alive for lack of railroad transport to a killing center

... whoever knew had to participate … otherwise, if they were not involved, they would be witnesses against … SS office personnel were assigned to mobile killing squads … staff officers were required to participate in the killing … the Political Division was required to countersign all instructions to embassies and legations for the deportation of Jews

... an eyewitness report … the father was holding the hand of a boy about ten years old … speaking to him softly … the boy was fighting his tears … the father pointed to the sky, stroked his son's head, seemed to be explaining something

[Nick Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, this time last week I was like, "oh phatty phatty score, Hilberg's three volumes for an incredible $20!" Well ladies and gents, incredible gets its lineage for a reason, and this of course was not the full three volumes of mighty detail suitable for curling up with or, in darker times, burning for warmth or political purposes either, but some abridged piece of shit fit only for hurling at walls like a chimpanzee flinging its own hot messy turdclumps. Or so I thought in my initial anger, storming about the (spacious, cheap, exquisitely air conditioned, dare-I-say-palatial? ahhh yes let the envy build, my New England Goodreads friends: your anguish sustains me! What do you call 1000 square feet in Atlanta? A closet!) apartment, reading aloud from the introduction "In this student edition, we've removed the footnotes -- Ahhhh yes, that's how we'll salvage the sinking ship of American higher education! Dropping footnotes! Fuck the world, save yourself! aieeeeee!" For the first thirty minutes of simmering, I pondered taking a job at Amazon, just to release some Ice-9 in their corporate offices and scrape into the freezeblock "this was done so that the memory of three volumes' worth of footnotes, written so that the memory of six million jews dispatched by the Third Reich would never perish from this earth, would never perish from this earth."

Then I realized I could never hurt Amazon without dealing mortal damage to myself. Truly we have become a single entity. A new plan was necessary.

So I read it, and wow, Hilberg's worth all the love he's won. There's many fine books about the "serious weenie roast" as David Foster Wallace might have (but obviously never) referred to it (it's only witty when applied to subjunctive eschatologies disguised via extended metaphor as games of adolescent tennis), especially Anus Mundi, The Saved and the Drowned, the proceedings of the Nuremberg warcrimes courts for those of us willing to drink some red bulls and get down, do the do, read primary sources (and this is much more coherent and complete than those), The Years of Extermination not so much actually despite its Pulitzer, about a hundred pages of Shirer, etc. All allude to the "huge repositories of Nazi documents", but none evidence the real detective work involved, as if there was a mountain of file folders in some Indiana Jones-like Allied Powers warehouse. Hilberg, one realizes plowing through the endless tables, webs of contracts, train schedules ad nauseam, was history's prosecutor. There was once a time, difficult for my generation to conceptualize, when the Holocaust seemed a real question. Those who'd maintain as much were pushed from center to margin pretty entirely by Hilberg.

That having been said -- this is one of the finest abridgments I can imagine. Even fifty more pages of detail would have been suffocating, even for an obsessive-compulsive autodidact like me, and totally lacking in narrative purpose. The main text is footnote-like enough, and that's what wins the four stars: no more dispassionate writeup is imaginable, and it's that perfectly-hung facade that makes this a more furious indictment of the Reich than anything I've come across. One really must read it, or at least the first two-hundred pages or so, to grok what I'm saying and countless others have said.

Fifth star deducted due to infrequent but irritatingly noticeable repetitions, especially of quotes.
---
Finally picked this up. Amazon 2009-08-25.

[Mike Blyth · Rating 5 out of 5]

On my list of 10 books that have changed my life: "Though it hasn't changed my life the way some books have, I rank it here because it was invaluable in understanding the dynamics of individual, social, and political evil."

[FiveBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilberg had great difficulty getting this book published. At that time people did not feel that the Holocaust was a subject that there was a lot of interest in. But, once it did get published, people saw that it was a subject of enormous historic importance. Hilberg concentrated on the way the mass murder was organised by the German state, and he had an eye especially for the issues of bureaucracy and technology, which he thought were the decisive factors that made this a new kind of major crime. Read the full interview at http://thebrowser.com/books/interview...

[Zalman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading. This is a meticulously referenced scholarly treatise, not a popular (or populist) history, Hilberg's deliberate historical style only occasionally leavened by an understated irony or outright sarcasm. Despite (or perhaps because of) the dryness of the language, the numerous organizational tables, the footnotes, and the statistics, the text is straightforward and not difficult to follow. The facts and events speak for themselves; particularly with the first two volumes, there are times when one must put down the book and weep.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a powerful, quiet book

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first of three volumes, comprising a thorough historical study of the Jewish Holocaust. The author's method places high emphasis on documentational evidence for his sources, but anectodal testimonials are not excluded.

Hilberg begins Volume I by explaining how a long European tradition of historical anti-semitism, social as well as legal, established a precedent and set the stage for the Nazi era.

He then proceeds to show us that creating the machinery of destruction entailed the heavy cooperation of all facets of German society: Civil Service, the Business Sector, the Army, and the Nazi Pary. (This is brought home by the wealth of official documents from various departments, an audit trail left behind by "normal" people.)

Next, Hilberg explores in detail the formation of the ghettos, concentration camps, and how their emergence varied according to location; How ghettoization and deportation were carried out in the Reich, in colonized areas, or in the occupied areas. Beginning experiments in gassing techniques are also documented.

After that, Volume I explores the "mobile killing operations", in which special commando units operated, seeking out victims and carrying out mass murders on the front lines during invasions, (1941-3?).

[Kris Sellgren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this history of the Holocaust asking myself: could the Holocaust have been prevented? And if so, when and how? Raul Hilberg suggests that the time to stop the Holocaust was when Germany passed its first law limiting Jewish civil rights. Think about that the next time you vote.

Hilberg first examines the history of anti-semitism before Hitler, which helps to understand why there was so little opposition. Jews faced slaughter in Europe repeatedly over 2000 years; the Nazis merely industrialized this process. Hilberg then demonstrates the steps the Nazis used: first defining what a Jew was and reducing their civil rights, second concentrating Jews in ghettos or camps, and third annihilating them. Finally, he considers the Jewish response. Fleeing Jews had nowhere to go outside Nazi-controlled territory: both the US and British-controlled Palestine restricted Jewish immigration, even after learning of the death camps. The European Jews had survived many pogroms by being cooperative and passive; this was fatal in the Holocaust.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

a classic in genocide theory - honestly, its a first source for operations and order in genocide. a must read for those interested

[Steven Godby · Rating 4 out of 5]

His better book is the Destruction of European Jews.

[Astrid Rondero · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essential lecture. Escaping wasn't easy and it isn't still. One cannot help recognize the patterns that repeat themselves every time intolerance and hatred awake in our "so called" modern societies. A great work of historical research. There's human struggle all trough these pages: from the Millions of lives destroyed and from the prudent and potent voice of a human historian who is trying to decipher the many reasons why.

[Gianna Burgio · Rating 1 out of 5]

….im sorry but this is so boring. i understand it’s an important monograph but boy was i DRAGGING

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE MOST IMPORTANT HISTORICAL STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST (IN A SHORTER VERSION)

Historian Raul Hilberg wrote in the Preface to this 1985 book, “The following pages contain a brief description of the destruction of the European Jews… The volume is designed for those who are not familiar with any details, but it is not an outline. All the contents have been taken from … a larger work… newly published in three volumes under the same title. These, then, are excerpts… tied together to form a smaller coherent whole.”

In Chapter 1, he states, “Since the fourth century after Christ there have been three anti-Jewish policies: conversion, expulsion, and annihilation… The Nazi destruction process … was the culmination of a cyclical trend. We have observed the trend in the three successive goals of anti-Jewish administrators. The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live.” (Pg. 7-8) He continues, “the anti-Jewish policies of conversion and expulsion … were also limits before which the bureaucracy had to stop… that is … why the German bureaucracy under Hitler did infinitely more damage in twelve years than the Catholic Church was capable of in twelve centuries.” (Pg. 13)

He notes, “racism acquired a ‘theoretical’ basis only in the 1880s. The racists of the nineteenth century stated explicitly that cultural characteristics … were the product of physical characteristics. Physical attributes did not change; hence social behavior patterns also had to be immutable. In the eyes of the anti-Semite, the Jews therefore became a ‘race.’” (Pg. 19)

He acknowledges, “The Jewish reactions to force have always been alleviation and compliance… This reaction pattern was born in the ghetto and it will die there… The alleviation-compliance response … has its beginnings with the Jewish philosophers … who bargained with the Romans on behalf of Jewry.. The Jewish policy .. assured to the embattled community a … chance for survival during the periods of expulsion and exclusion… the Jews have always played along with an attacker… in the knowledge that their policy would result in [the] least damage and least injury.” (Pg. 23)

He says of the April 7, 1933 Nazi Germany anti-Jewish decree, “There was [a] difficulty … [in] the substance of the measure. The term ‘non-Aryan’ had been defined in such a way as to include not only full Jews… persons with four Jewish grandparents---but also three-quarters Jews, half-Jews, and one-quarter Jews. Such a definition was considered necessary in order to eliminate from official positions all persons who might have been carriers of ‘Jewish influence’ even in the slightest degree.” (Pg. 28-29) He adds, “half-Jews were called ‘Mischlinge’… [P]ractice … split the non-Aryans into two groups: Mischlinge and Jews… subsequent measures were … taken only against ‘Jews.’” (Pg. 31-32) He summarizes, “in consecutive steps, the Jewish community was isolated socially, crowded into special houses, restricted in its movements, and exposed by a system of identification. This process… called ‘ghettoization,’ was completed with the institution of a Jewish administrative apparatus… it is essential to know the origins of the Jewish bureaucratic machine. The Jews created that machine themselves.” (Pg. 59)

He recounts, “When the German army moved into Poland in September 1939… the machinery of destruction in Poland overtook and outdid the bureaucracy in Berlin. There were three reasons for this development. One is… the German administration in Poland… [was] less ‘bureaucratic’ than the administration in the Reich. Another… reason … was the German conception of the … Polish Jew… The Germans referred to Eastern Jewry as ‘subhumanity’… the bureaucracy could be less considerate and more drastic… The third and most important reason was the weight of its numbers: Ten percent of the Polish population was Jewish… The uprooting and segregation of so many Jews posed altogether different problems.” (Pg. 64-65) Later, he explains, “The ghetto was a captive city-state in which territorial confinement was combined with absolute subjugation to German authority.” (Pg. 89)

He outlines, “When the bureaucracy had completed … their concentration in ghettos, it had reached a dividing line. Any further step would put an end to Jewish existence in Nazi Europe… the crossing of this threshold was referred to as ‘the final solution of the Jewish question… The aim … was to be death… The Jewish problem would never have to be solved again… The annihilation phase consisted of two major operations. The first was launched … with the invasion of the USSR. SS and Police were dispatched to Soviet territory, where they were to kill all Jewish inhabitants on the spot… a second operation was instituted … [in] which the Jewish population … were transported to camps equipped with gassing installations… The effort … was deemed necessary to accomplish the ‘Final Solution’ on a European-wide scale.” (Pg. 99) He adds, “Einsatzgruppen… were the first mobile killing units.” (Pg. 102) He continues, “the Einsatzgruppen moved closely on the heels of the advancing armies… The Einsatzgruppen had moved with such speed … that several hundred thousand Jews could be killed like sleeping flies.” (Pg. 107, 109) He recounts, “Across the whole occupied territory Jews were turning to the Christian population for assistance---in vain.” (Pg. 119) “The killers were well armed, they knew what to do and they worked swiftly. The victims were unarmed, bewildered, and followed orders.” (Pg. 126)

Himmler asked his chief of staff for “killing methods more humane than shooting… The eventual answer … was the gas van… There were many technical and psychological problems with the gas vans in the fields… Clearly, alcohol, speeches, and gas vans did not eliminate the psychological problems generated by the killings. Yet there was no breakdown in the operations as a whole.” (Pg. 138) He adds, “partial figures, aggregating more than 900,000, account for only about two thirds of the total number of Jewish victims in mobile operations.” (Pg. 153)

He recounts, “in 1939, Adolf Hitler uttered a threat of total annihilation in language far more explicit than… his predecessors: ‘… If international-finance Jewry … should succeed … in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will be… the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’” (Pg. 157) He continues, “Heydrich now took the next step, He instructed … Adolf Eichmann to draft an authorization what would allow him to proceed against Jewry on a European-wide basis…. The text was signed by Göring … With the receipt of this letter Heydrich held the reins of the destruction process in his hands.” (Pg. 163) Heydrich “sent invitations … for a ‘Final Solution’ conference… The meaning of ‘Final Solution’ had to be surmised.” (Pg. 165) He continues, “After the meeting… Gradually the news of the ‘Final Solution’ seeped through the ranks… Hitler himself addressed the German people … on September 30, 1942: ‘[After] my Reichstag speech…the Jews of Germany laughed about my prophecies… I can only repeat: they will stop laughing everywhere, and I shall be right also in the prophecy.’” (Pg. 168)

He asks, “What was the overall reaction of the Jews in the face of certain death? Did Jewry prepare for armed resistance?... The Jewish leadership in the Polish ghettos stood at the helm of the compliance movement, and ghetto chiefs were the implementors of the surrender.” (Pg. 196) But he adds, “The largest single clash between Jews and Germans occurred in the ghetto Warsaw. [But] for the further development of the destruction process, this armed encounter was without consequence.” (Pg. 199)

He explains, “The most secret operations of the destruction process were carried out in six camps located in Poland… The killing centers worked quickly and efficiently. A man would step off a train in the morning, and in the evening his corpse was burned and his clothes were packed away for shipment to Germany… The most striking fact about the killing center operations is that… they were unprecedented. Never before in history had people been killed on an assembly-line basis.” (Pg. 221) He continues, “The death camps operated with gas… [T]hought had been given in Germany… to the notion that life not worth living may be unworthy of life. This… was accomplished by representing retarded or malfunctioning persons … as sick or harmful cells in the healthy corpus of the nation… ‘Euthanasia’ was a conceptual … prefiguration of the ‘Final Solution’ in the death camps..” (Pg. 225-226) He goes on, “Zyklon was … manufactured … to exterminate rodents and insects in enclosed spaces… That it should now have become [used]… to kill off Jews by the hundreds of thousands is no mere accident. In German propaganda, Jews had frequently been portrayed as insects.” (Pg. 235)

He notes, “The success of the killing operations depended… upon the maintenance of secrecy… At no point would any disclosure be permitted; at no time could the camp management afford to be caught off guard. The killers had to conceal their work from every outsider, they had to mislead and fool the victims, and they had to erase all traces of the operation.” (Pg 238-240) He recounts, “Selections were undertaken… in order to pick out deportees who would be able to work, but also… to eliminate inmates too sick or too weak to work any longer… When the Auschwitz victims filed into the gas chamber, they discovered that the imitation showers did not work… An SS man … emptied one can after another into the gas chamber… the victims began to scream… Within fifteen minutes… everyone in the gas chamber was dead. The gas was allowed to escape… The Jewish work parties (Sonderkommandos), wearing gas masks, dragged out the bodies… and hosed down the dead… [which] were searched for hidden valuables, and gold teeth were extracted… The bodies would then be cremated.” (Pg. 247-249)

He states, “How did the German bureaucrat cope with his moral inhibitions? He did so in an inner struggle… Fundamentally, this arsenal of defenses consisted of two parts: a mechanism of repression and a system of rationalizations. First of all, the bureaucracy wanted to hide its deeds. It wanted to conceal the destructive process not only from all outsiders but also from the censuring gaze of its own conscience… Despite such attempts, the annihilation of the Jews was becoming an open secret… Thus, the first stage in the repression was to shut off the supply of information from all those who did not have to know it… The second stage was to make sure that whoever knew would participate… The third stage in the process of repression was the prohibition of criticism… In its fourth stage the repressive mechanism eliminated the destruction process as a subject of social conversation… The fifth and final stage in the process of repression was to omit mention of ‘killings’… even in the secret correspondence… The process of repression was continuous, but it was never completed.” (Pg. 278-282)

He goes on, “Psychological justification is called rationalization. The Germans employed two kinds of rationalization. The first was an attempt to justify the destruction process as a whole. It was designed to explain why the Jews had to be destroyed. The other explanations served only to justify individual participation in the destruction process---a signature on a piece of paper or the squeeze of a trigger.” (Pg. 283)

He explains, “over a period of centuries the Jews had learned that in order to survive they had to refrain from resistance. Time and again they were attacked… There were many casualties in these times … but always the Jewish community emerged once again…. The Jews had never really been annihilated… Only in 1942, 1943 and 1944 did the Jewish leadership realize that, unlike the pogroms of past centuries, the modern machinelike destruction process would engulf European Jewry. But the realization came too late. A 2000-year-old lesson could not be unlearned; the Jews could not make the switch. They were helpless.” (Pg. 300-301)

This book (even in this ‘Student Edition,’ for those of us who can’t afford the 3-volume edition) is absolute “must reading” for anyone studying the Holocaust, and its related topics.

[Sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the abridged, student edition of Raul Hilberg's classic three volume history of the Holocaust; in which the author provides the reader with the Nazi perspective of the Jews and the so-called 'Jewish question', as well as a view of how the victims reacted to their persecution and ultimate destruction. Hilberg asserts that without the cooperation of the Jewish communities themselves, millions of people would not have been killed.

While the text has a reputation for being rather dry, I only found this to be the case for a couple of chapters - those focusing on the mobile killing operations and deportations. The rest - particularly the chapters dealing with historical precedents to the Jewish genocide, how the Nazi's came to decide who was a Jew and who was not, the 'nature of the process', and attempts at rescue - were all quite enthralling. I had never before heard the story about Himmler's offer to the Allies to swap Jews for equipment; the details of which I won't reveal here.

Ultimately, Hilberg's work highlights just how senseless and irrational the antisemitism of Hitler and his sympathisers (and there were a lot of them in Europe) was, which was summarised at Nuremberg by Anti-Partisan Chief and member of the Higher SS von dem Bach; who having observed and killed Jews from 1941 onwards in Russia said:

"Contrary to the opinion of the National Socialists that the Jews were a highly organized group, the appalling fact was that they had no organization whatsoever. The mass of the Jewish people were taken completely by surprise. They did not know at all what to do; they had no directives or slogans as to how they should act. That is the greatest lie of anti-Semitism because it gives the lie to the slogan that Jews are conspiring to dominate the world and that they are so highly organized. In reality they had no organization of their own at all, not even an information service. If they had some sort of organization, these people could have been saved by the millions; but instead they were taken completely by surprise. Never before has a people gone as unsuspectingly to its disaster. Nothing was prepared. Absolutely nothing. It was not so, as the anti-Semites say, that they were friendly to the Soviets. That is the most appalling misconception of all. The Jews in the old Poland, who were never communistic in their sympathies, were, throughout the area of the Bug eastward, more afraid of Bolshevism than of the Nazis. This was insanity. They could have been saved. There were people among them who had much to lose, business people; they didn't want to leave. In addition there was love of home and their experience with the pogroms in Russia. After the first anti-Jewish actions of the Germans, they thought now the wave was over and so they walked back to their undoing."

The lies that continue to be spread today of a global conspiracy concerning the Holocaust are just as absurd and illogical.


While Hilberg's thousands of footnotes are missing from this edition, it does include a decent bibliography of further reading from which many of his sources are taken.

[Jean-paul Audouy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this books in two steps. First by reading the 400 pages about the rise of Hitler in the last "My Struggle" book by Karl Ove Knausgård where he mentions several times the movie "Shoah". So I watched the 9 hour movie and Raul Hilberg was interviewed mostly in the Warsaw ghetto section. That led me to read his book "The Destruction of The European Jews". Now that I know so much more about how it happened I'm left shattered but with more questions than answers about this abomination. How could the same people and civilisation which gave the world Beethoven's music, Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther", Schubert's "Nacht und Träume" lied could put all its energy in annihilating 6 million human beings in the most efficient way? How the usually admired German qualities of order, organisation, hard work would be put to the task of finding practical solutions to the problems posed by the killing and disposal of 6 million corpses? And most disturbingly, it leaves open the question: What would I have done as a German functionary in the Reichsbahn organising the transports to the death camps or a potential Jewish victim?
"Ist der Holocaust ein Irrweg oder eine Spiegelung unseres selbst?"
Mass massacres (Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia) took place after that so I fear it's the later…

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

The definite book about the destruction of the Jews during WWII. Hilberg deconstruct the Nazi machinery bolt by bolt and explains the steps taken to destroy the Jews in Europeit is nopw the recognized source for all the other books on the subject. I've read the French version in 3 volumes, updated a few years ago, after the opening of the russian archives.

[Kara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a textbook about the Holocaust. The prose is dry as dust, but somehow the horrible things Hilberg discusses have more impact because of the scholarly tone. Lots of facts, figures and quotes from primary sources. I admit to skimming some parts, but overall, it was a very interesting (and sad) book.

[AskHistorians]

Basically the original work on the Holocaust by the father of Holocaust studies. Originally published in 1961, and revised in 1985, it is available in both an abridged version and as three volumes. Hilberg was a stellar scholar, and while some of it is naturally out of date, it still holds up well today.

[Rebecca]

I heard about this book from the author's NYTimes obituary. On my recent roadtrip I listened to an audiobook set in pre-Nazi Munich. Many of the camps & gas chambers were located there. This sounds like a good book to follow on to that.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a thorough, authoritative, and extensively documented work on the Holocaust. It is full of statistics and charts, but it does not minimize the human aspect of this horrible tragedy. The facts and figures are perhaps the biggest indictment and judgement against the Nazi regime.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course.

[Courtney Stirrat · Rating 5 out of 5]

There have been a million books written on the history of the holocaust, but this remains the authoritative tomb. Must read for every liberally educated person. Must, must!

[Leif Barron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anxiously awaiting this text which may be the single most important study of the Holocaust ever written.

[Emily]

*To read for: list of coded terms used to mask murder, i.e. "Sonderbehandlung," meaning Special Treatment in German, but code for immediate killing.

[Güis Guerrero-Enterría · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es una de esas obras que lees con pesar por lo que cuenta pero que lees hasta el final. Muy completa. casi definitiva sobre el tema.

[Carlo Mayer]

Finiti

[Chaim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This must be one of the most informative books on the Holocaust in so few pages. Highly recommended.

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Undoubtedly the most harrowing and exact account of the Holocaust. Tough read but worth it

[Tina]

Foundational