Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union (Eighth Edition)

An interesting book. The first section describes the gradual tightening of legal restrictions on the Jewish people of Germany. Each decree gradually stripping another layer of civil protection by defining them as second class citizens. The final legal step was to define what a Jew was, and how they no longer qualified even as a second class citizen. The second part of the book tells the story of the same process in Poland. Each step was carefully calculated as part of the final solution of the "Jewish problem." Interesting is Heydrichs order in 1939 where it is obvious that extermination was the final goal. Also interesting, at least for me, was how clearly Hitler considered Jews and Communists one and the same. Rather, you could be a communist without being a Jew, but all communists took orders from the international Jewish conspiracy. The final section describes the events in the Soviet Union where the Holocaust operated without any restraints. This book is about the destruction of the Jewish population so you will not find any reference to the deaths of millions of Poles, Ukranians, etc. An interesting book. If you have minimal knowledge of the Holocaust this would give the reader a starting point. Please remember this not going to read like a novel although in its own way it is a narrative. A narrative of the destruction of the Jewish people.

This series of legal documents, decrees, orders, instructions or live accounts describes better than any litterary form the progression in horror which our Jewish parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nevews had to suffer from April fools' day of 1933 when waring the David star was enforced to this community until the end of the second world war in mid 1945. As a Christian I was surprised to discover that the trauma resulting from the horrifying murders is so deep in the Jewish community that, for most, its members if they do know about the holocaust, actually don't have a real view of it. Naturally the massive and sadistic aggresion against the Jewish people screens, in this book, the fate of the ones who shared their fate for having protected them or for having fought the Nazis. After all Jewish people suffered between two third and three quarter of the enormous human non-military losses under surrealistically inhuman conditions. This book should be handled with the respect normally due to religious books: it represents the steps of the martyrdom of the Jewish families under Nazi madness.The content of the book should be remembered in details by every western culture including Israel's right wing (after all "Nazi" represents the danger of mixing nationalism and socialism...) Americans should learn from this book that being more powerful doesn't mean being better. Europeans could find in it how non elected "public servants" laugh at democratically elected representatives (elected ones disappear over the time, bureaucrats remain and never have to respond for diffused results).For the content of this book to be fully meaningful, it should be enlightened by Milgram's explanation of how "Obedience to authority" made it possible for these horror to happen.A major book which supplies everything Jewish and non Jewish need to know. A reedition with a lot of proper photographs of the murders by the Einsatzgruppen, of the Gettos and of the concentration camps conditions would be welcome.