The Holocaust

Martin Gilbert's narration of the brutality and heartless slaughter of Jewish men, women, and children of all ages leaves nothing to the imagination. Many were starved to death, died from disease, or shot dead on the spot. Gilbert spoke in conversation with many of the survivors who gave their personal testimony. This is a must read for a student of the Holocaust. It is well researched with many references to the testimony given at the Eichmann and Nuremberg trials. It includes many maps further identifying the many cities, towns, and villages throughout Europe from where the Jewish populations were hunted and forcibly assembled in the town squares and marched to nearby railway stations for deportations, many dying in route to the death camp destinations that were built to carry out the Nazi's systematic extermination of the Jews. Use of eyewitness accounts describe the relentless barbarity, inhumane treatment, and savagery of the persecution of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis and their anti-Semitic followers. The sheer enormity and frequency of the number of gassings at the death camps throughout Germany and Poland is enough to give the reader pause to consider how industrialized the process of extermination was. Gilbert narrates extensively about the Jewish resistance and revolts against their executioners that were planned and carried out in spite of the well-known practice of reprisals that exponentially killed many more Jews even during the last few weeks before liberation.

Martin Gilbert's the Holocaust is the most comprehinsive and in depth work I have read on this subject, and why it gets 5 stars is because of the very personal nature of this book. Mr. Gilbert reverts the numbers back into real people. When reading other books on the Holocaust I found myself being deluged with these massive numbers of atrocities until they began to become abstracted and unreal, but Mr. Gilbert's account is so detailed and filled with personal accounts that every page fills you with a greater sense of the reality and the scope of this tragedy. Instead of a clinical account of numbers, this book has personal and eyewitness accounts throughout. He never lets you forget that these were real people with families, friends and real lives. This is a gut-wrenching read that forces you to look into the darkest reaches of human nature and see just how vicious human biengs can be to one another. A Diary of Anne Frank on a grand scale.

When one of the world's most eminent historians takes on the single most amazing phenomenon of the century, the Holocaust, it gives one pause for thought. So here we have Sir Martin Gilbert, a noted Holocaust authority, writing masterfully about the events leading up to and including the systematic persecution, deportation and murder of the Jews of Europe. His stirring and singular narrative is regularly punctuated by a number of poignant and shocking eyewitness accounts of many who lived through those numbing events. The test is extremely approachable and easy to read, so that the non-historian can appreciate the breadth and scope of his recounting of the events during the 12-year reign of terror levied by the National Socialists in Nazi Germany.His approach is chronological, much like that employed in his best-selling three volume series on the 20th century. While he relies heavily on established secondary sources for his documentation, the power of his prose and his well-organized approach makes this an entertaining and educational tome to venture into. Although nowhere near as comprehensive as some other tomes such as Klaus Fischer's "History Of An Obsession", he does trace the centuries' long tradition of anti-Semitism culminating in the official state sanctioned approach codified in the institutionalized Nuremberg laws. In all this, Gilbert brilliantly employs survivor's recollections to paint the atrocities in the hues and colors of real human beings, ordinary and identifiable individuals caught in the insanity of the Third Reich. Furthermore, he pursues their individual identities and humanity by giving the reader information on the postwar futures of these people. So much has been written about the Holocaust that it is difficult to imagine much new or novel to arise some fifty years after the end of the war. Yet the stage always remains open for the unusual display of finely crafted historical perspectives and brilliantly executed prose. The brilliance in this dazzling book is, as Oscar Schindler would have said, in the presentation. Although I have read a number of other books about these times and events that were more detailed, more graphic, or more comprehensive, this is without a doubt the single most impressive, cohesive, and authoritative volume I have read to date regarding the Holocaust in its enormity, and placed in an understandable and comprehensible context. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in owning the single best one-volume book summarizing and explaining the realities of the Holocaust.

This is likely to be the standard history of the holocaust. It is meticulously researched and documented.A study of the systematic destruction of European Jewry. A masterpiece chronicling an attempt at modern day genocide.Jews were subjected to horrific, inhumane suffering and murder in ghettoes, slave labour camps, concentration camps and forced marches. Atrocities that were well documented by the Nazi murder-machine.A chilling but essential possession and reference that needs to be read and re-read. I have visited many of the sites referred to, indeed most of the still remaining concentration camps in Poland. With the alarming increase in anti-Semitism now prevalent worldwide, especially again in Europe, books such as this are crucial, indispensable tools that must prevent us from allowing society to follow this path again.

The more people hear about the Holocaust in our Holocaust-drenched culture, the less they seem to know about it. Most people's understanding of the Holocaust reduces to simplistic abstractions and cliches, particularly the notion that the worst thing about the Nazi war against the Jews was that it was impersonal and bureaucratic. This book is the antidote to all that. By tracing in specific detail, from month to month and year to year, what the Nazi regime actually did to the Jewish communities of Europe that fell under its power, Martin Gilbert gives the reader a more vivid and concrete sense of the Holocaust than can be found in any other book (or museum) on the subject. Contrary to the focus of the popular mind on Auschwitz and gas chambers, the Holocaust did not consist of one event or one crime. It consisted of innumerable, specific crimes, in a steadily mounting unleashing of cruelty that only an epic-length treatment such as Mr. Gilbert's could adequately portray. This is an indispensable book that will forever change your understanding of one of history's central events.

Of the thirty books I have read on this subject, this one book tells the reader most of what they would ever want to know about this historic event. The book is logically laid out from the seeds of antisemitism to the "Final Solution." After reading this book, I visited some of the places mentioned and felt the power of these places through Gilbert's words. An outstanding read!