The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy

by Martin Gilbert

This is a very thorough account of the experience of the Jews of Europe during World War II. It is virtually a day-by-day account, in men and women's own words, of the horrifying events of the Holocaust - the Nazi attempt to exterminate people of the Jewish religion.

Genres: History, Holocaust, Nonfiction, World War II, War, Germany, Historical

959 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

The official biographer of Winston Churchill and a leading historian on the Twentieth Century, Sir Martin Gilbert was a scholar and an historian who, though his 88 books, has shown there is such a thing as “true history”

Born in London in 1936, Martin Gilbert was educated at Highgate School, and Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with First Class Honours. He was a Research Scholar at St Anthony's College, and became a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1962, and an Honorary Fellow in 1994. After working as a researcher for Randolph Churchill, Gilbert was chosen to take over the writing of the Churchill biography upon Randolph's death in 1968, writing six of the eight volumes of biography and editing twelve volumes of documents. In addition, Gilbert has written pioneering and classic works on the First and Second World Wars, the Twentieth Century, the Holocaust, and Jewish history.
Gilbert drove every aspect of his books, from finding archives to corresponding with eyewitnesses and participants that gave his work veracity and meaning, to finding and choosing illustrations, drawing maps that mention each place in the text, and compiling the indexes. He travelled widely lecturing and researching, advised political figures and filmmakers, and gave a voice and a name “to those who fought and those who fell.”

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Reviews

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading history, especially history of genocide and mass murder, gives you a certain perspective. It shows how messed up we humans are and how cruel the world we inhabit can be. It disabuses you of any notion that you might have of intrinsic human decency. It shows that it’s not particularly hard for us to sink to such lows in which we can end up justifying the murder of innocent civilians and the butchering of small children in the millions. Faced with records of malice and horror on the scale of Holocaust, argument becomes moot. Some would say that we should try to learn from history. But what is there to learn from Holocaust? That we should be careful not to let it happen again? That history repeats itself if we are not careful? Even if Holocaust has lessons for us living right now, for those who perished under the Nazi tyranny it doesn’t have anything to offer — for 6 million Jews who were massacred throughout occupied Europe, history cannot repeat itself because their unremitting suffering under the hobnailed boots of the Nazis and their henchmen, ended with the forfeiture of their most valued possession: their lives. No, History never repeats.

Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust is an unrelenting chronicle of experiences of the European Jews who were trapped and destroyed, one at a time at first, then in groups of hundreds and eventually in tens of thousands. Page after page of desolation precipitated by indescribable Nazi barbarity and savagery. Going through each chapter is a struggle because it can eat you from inside if you don’t move ahead quickly. Gilbert’s account moves with a fast pace, like you’re watching a jolting horror movie at 2x playback speed. Because of that, individual stories of the Lost might not remain with you and they start to blur. But converged back-to-back, the pictures form a vista of SS squads bawling Schnell! and rushing helpless souls into trains destined for extermination; of mothers wailing, children crying, and fathers breaking apart; of masses of people shouting in their silence to leave us be — to no avail.

It’s hard to say from where the German hatred against the Jews originated. It was a deadly combination of ancient hatred and madness of the time. On that, Gilbert doesn’t offer any explanation. This book is a vast ledger of agony and torment. It’s powerful and it’s vivid lest you forget what Holocaust entailed for its victims.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Holocaust overwhelms. It is a crime that beggars the imagination. My mind cannot fully grasp the concept of six million anything, much less six million people, much less six million people rounded up and murdered, burned to ash, and scattered across a continent. What happened in Europe between 1939 and 1945 is almost too much to handle on any but the most abstract terms.

Perhaps that is why, if you search “Holocaust” on Amazon.com, you are given titles that represent thin slices of the Holocaust experience. Personal memoirs by survivors. Stories about the children who survived. Books about the Jews in Warsaw who fought back, or about the few good men and women, such as Oskar Schindler, who tried to help. This is the Holocaust treated like a mortgage, cut into palatable tranches.

A reader can pick up a book like Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, or even Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, and find a glimmer of hope and redemption lining the dark and ugly clouds of the death camps, gas chambers, and crematoria. It offers some little faith in humanity that keeps readers from setting down their books and finding a German to punch in the face.

There is a strong human compulsion to put the best face on any situation. This is probably a function of the fact that we are all dying and no one has yet told us the point. This holds true of the Holocaust. I visited Germany when I was in high school, and my class took a day trip to the Dachau concentration camp, just outside Munich. One of the things I best remember is a striking, simple memorial: a wall, with a two word phrase written in Hebrew, French, German, English, and Russian. The words: Never Again.

It’s nice to think that, isn’t it? That we learned something from the Holocaust, as though it were a teachable moment, rather than a crime without parallel. Of course, it has happened again (in Cambodia, the Balkans, and Rwanda). And even if it hadn’t happened again, our noble sentiments can’t raise the dead.

At the time, I didn’t care. I thought the monument was cool. I snapped a picture, hopped back on the tour bus, and headed into Munich to grab some beers at the Hofbräuhaus before stumbling to the Glockenspiel (which sucks, by the way).

Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust is unique in its near-unflinching refusal to offer false hope or faith in humanity. It is a big, dense book, with a stark black cover emblazoned with blood-red lettering; in many ways it is a monument, filled with the stories of the dead.

The Holocaust purports to be a history of European Jewry during World War II. That’s a pretty large scope, and 815 pages isn’t nearly enough to cover that whole topic.

To make things manageable, Martin opts to skimp on the set-up, the larger context in which the Holocaust was seeded, planted, and brought to life. The first 80 pages cover everything from the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ to World War I to Kristallnacht to the Nuremberg Laws. Rather than being head-spinning, however, this portion of the book was plodding. It never found a comfortable balance between the macro, meso and micro levels of the narrative. I also never got a sense as to what events Gilbert was trying to highlight, and which events he found unimportant. I suppose I was also a bit unmoored, since Gilbert doesn’t tell this story through the eyes of the usual suspects. He leaves the top-ranking Nazis in the background, and focuses on the stories of ordinary Jewish people, told in their own words. While this brings an admirable intimacy and immediacy to the proceedings, it also cramps your ability to see the big picture (essentially you are viewing history through a keyhole).

Around 100 pages in, the Germans invade Poland, divvy it up with the Soviet Union, and then decide to attack Russia. The German strike into Stalin’s Soviet Union really kicks off the liquidation phase of the Holocaust, which up until this point had been garden-variety genocide (stripping Jews of their civil rights, seizing their property, forcing them from their homes, and herding them into ghettoes).

At this point, I really started to question Gilbert’s ability to pull this book off, or my ability (or willingness) to finish. There is page after page of mass executions, mass graves. The Nazis round everyone up, make them take off their clothes, march them into the forest, have them dig their own graves, and then shoot them in the back of their heads. The Nazis pack up and move along. Then the whole thing repeats.

We move from one killing site to another. The stories start to blur. I started to lose track of where we were (there are a lot of maps, but they weren’t helpful to me, especially without a good master map). Gilbert keeps throwing ridiculous numbers out on the page (whole towns, whole generations, lost), and intersperses the dry figures (what does it mean that 1,000 people died, or 10,000?) with horrific stories of Jews who somehow survived in the killing pits, trapped beneath the naked, blood-streaked corpses of countless victims.

It is relentless. And I suppose it is meant to be so. However, Gilbert runs the very real risk of violating the Stalin-era dictum that “a million deaths is a statistic.” The barrage of mass killings, the staggering casualty figures, have an anesthetizing effect. It doesn’t become boring, per se, but it starts to breed indifference.

At this point, I should mention Gilbert’s writing style. It’s not really a style at all; rather, it is a structure. He relies heavily on the writing and remembrances of survivors. That is, he relies on their own exact words. In almost 815 pages of text, almost every paragraph includes a direct quotation from one source or another. Much of the book is made up of block-quotes (one entire chapter is an extended excerpt detailing one Jew’s escape). Gilbert is like a tailor, using his words as a needle and thread to stitch together the various personal stories.

As I mentioned earlier, this structure hampered the early chapters of The Holocaust, detailing the post-Weimar, pre-Invasion days in Germany, which call for a more macro, God’s-eye view. Later on, as the Einsatzgruppen terrorize the Soviet Union, the structure is more effective, though as I pointed out above, is about as subtle (and enjoyable) as a frying pan to the head.

Somewhere along the way, however, and I’m not sure where, an unexpected thing happened: I realized I couldn’t put this book down. The individual stories are powerful, and often very-well told; the cumulative effect, though, is shattering. Even in a sea of blood, there are moments, details, that stand out:

We undressed quickly and, our arms uplifted we went in the direction of the ditches we had dug ourselves. The graves which were two meters deep were full of naked bodies…[W]e lay down quickly, in order to avoid looking at the dead. My little daughter was quaking with fear, and asked me to cover her eyes. I embraced her head; my left hand I put on her eyes while in my right I held her hands. In this way we lay down, our faces turned downwards. Shots were fired; I felt a sharp pain in my hand…

The survivor’s-eye-view has its drawbacks. For one, you only get one side of the story. I understand that this is a history of the Jews, by the Jews. However, including more stories from the perpetrators would have added a lot of corroboration to the Jewish testimony, giving it even more weight. The ground-level viewpoint also causes you to lose a sense of the chronological progression of events. The year is given on top of each page, so you know that you’re in 1941 or 1942, but otherwise, you might find yourself a bit adrift as to the timeline. This is accentuated by Gilbert’s decision to minimize discussion of anything not related to the Holocaust. (There are obvious space constraints, but I would’ve have liked to have seen Gilbert integrate the Holocaust into World War II a bit more. They weren’t parallel events, after all. Indeed, there is a good argument to be made that the Holocaust – the elimination of the Jews – was Hitler’s preeminent goal, one that he devoted possibly war-saving resources to accomplish).

Obviously, in any broad history, the author has to choose what to stress. Here, Gilbert really belabors the familiar. He spends a great deal of time detailing the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. This is a famous story, told many times. I would’ve appreciated Gilbert emphasizing the lesser-known acts of Jewish resistance, such as the revolt at Treblinka. Gilbert actually quotes a Jewish fighter saying, ruefully, that his life and death will boil down to three sentences in a history book. And that’s about all Gilbert actually gives him.

Along those lines, Gilbert has chosen to focus on one particular aspect of the Holocaust above all others: the ghettoizing, deportation, and gassing of the Jews. That means skimping out on a lot of other aspects of the Holocaust. For instance, there is very little about day-to-day life and survival in the concentration camps.

These aren’t criticisms as much as they are observations. Gilbert could not fully cover everything without writing a book that requires a wheelbarrow to haul around.

In the end, The Holocaust is a testament. It is a voluminous refutation to people like David Irving who attempt to deny or minimize the destruction of European Jewry during World War II.

At times, The Holocaust is hard to read, for a variety of reasons beyond the darkness of the subject matter. Ultimately, though, it is rewarding. When you are nose deep in the book, all the collected stories, end-to-end, seem repetitive. But when you step away, and get a little distance, you realize that all the collected stories, end-to-end, have created a monument as powerful and lasting as anything constructed of stone or marble.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Holocaust A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War , by prolific historian Martin Gilbert , is the most comprehensive one volume work on the Holocaust out there.

It begins with describing Hitler's rise to power and the history of anti-Semitism in Europe during the 20th century.

It goes on to describe the pogroms against Jews in Germany during the 1930's , and the stripping away of their basic human rights.

Gilbert describes Kristallknacht and the violent destruction of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues.

Gilbert describes how during the Holocaust , Hungary , Italy , Bulgaria and German occupied Denmark attempted to protect their Jews from Nazi genocide. No Jews were deported from Italy to death camps until after the fall of Mussolini and the German occupation of northern Italy in the autumn of 1943.

The main theme of this book is hundreds of eyewitness accounts of the unbelievable horrors perpetrated against Jewish men , women and children by the Nazis and their subordinates, during the Second World War , which resulted in the destruction of six million Jews , including 1 and a half million Jewish children. One is numbed by the sheer horror and bestiality of it all, as page after page is filled with graphic inhuman cruelty and bloodshed.

Particularly heartrending is the way children were treated by the Nazis.

It is from eyewitness accounts that we discover how the SS used to amuse themselves by swinging Jewish children by their legs and then flinging them to their deaths. Another eyewitness Maria Hochberg-Marianska desribed the fate of Jewish children during the mass deportations in Cracow in March 1943 :

"At Midday cars drove up before the institution. The Gestapo men flung themselves upon the children. Little ones , three years of age , were flung into baskets and placed on platforms or hoisted on to carts. The older children were driven off to Plac Zgody , flanked by armed soldiers. There they joined the grown ups. The baskets with the little ones were emptied behind the city like so much rubbish. There they were thrown into a ditch , most of them alive. Some were killed with a blow by a rifle butt before burial."

During the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto several hundred small children were shot in the entrance to one of the houses , and several hundred old people were killed in the street. So we continue to read of the mass executions and torures and horrors inflicted on the Jews of Europe in these times.

We read accounts of Mengele's horrific experiments on adults and children , and of Jews of all ages being thrown into furnaces ,and of course the mass executions of millions of men , women and children in gas chambers and by shooting and then throwing the bodies and half-alive survivors into pits...

It is simply impossible to document how one feels reading page after page , these accounts of the scope of inhumane monstrosity

Also disturbing is the section on how after Nazi Germany was defeated , hundreds of Jews were slaughtered by anti-Semitic Poles , and how Soviet soldiers enaged in the rape of Jewish girls who had survived the concentration camps.

One of the photos in the photograph panels is a heartbreaking picture of a four year old little Jewish orphan girl , shot to death with six other Jews by an anti-Semitic Pole , just after the war.

As well as the six million Jews murdered , another ten million non-combatants were killed by the Nazis , including a quarter of a million gypsies and millions of Poles , Czechs , Serbs , Russians , French , Italians and Greeks.

Poles , Czechs , Serbs were to become subject people of the Germans in the New Order but only the Jews were singled out to be destroyed in their entirety . Every single Jewish man , women and child was to disappear so that there would be no Jewish life in Europe.

Some of the parallels with early Nazi anti-Semitism and the new anti-Semitism of the 20th century , are chilling.

For example the boycott of all Jewish shops , cafes and businesses in the 1930's in Germany is echoed by the calls for sanctions and divestment against Israel and for boycotts of Israeli products and businesses , by academics , far-left politicians and trade unions , around the world today.Also , the cultural , professional and academic boycotts of Jews in Europe then , are echoed by the cultural , professional and academic boycotts of Israel and Israelis , including the banning of Israeli scholars and research today in various universities across the world , including North America and Europe.

70 years ago the cry of the anti-Semites in Europe was 'Jew , go to Palestine!' . Today the cry of anti-Semites (Yes-anti-Semites!) around the world is 'Jew-Out of Palestine'. The book documents how between 1929 and 1939, with the rise of Nazism in Germany , a new wave of 250,000 immigrants went to the Land of Israel (Palestine) , the majority of these, 174,000, arrived in Palestine between 1933-1936, after which increasing restrictions on immigration by the British made immigration clandestine and illegal.

In 1933 in reaction to the arrival of Jewish refugees in Palestine , Arab attacks on Jews were launched , and continued unabated until 1939.

Nazi broadcasts beamed to Palestine , Syria and Egypt helped ensure Arab hostility helped ensure that Arab hostility towards the Jewish refugees from Nazism would be kept as high as possible. In response to Arab terror , and afraid of alienating Arab support , the British blocked hundreds of thousands of Jews , attempting to flee Nazi terror , to enter Palestine.

History has shown that when anti-Semitism is allowed to spread beyond the cesspool of the mind that contains it, slaughter of innocents and the destruction of entire nations seem inevitably to follow. Today, Israel is about the size of the state of New Jersey, with a Jewish population of less than 1% of the world's population. Yet, Iran's president says the Holocaust is a "myth" and Israel "must be wiped off the map."-which would mean the genocide of another 5 million Jews , nearly half of the world's Jewish population . Over half of all Holocaust survivors today live in Israel (as do many descendants of Holocaust survivors), and it would be a hideous twist of history for these too to perish in the flames of anti-Jew hatred, as they would do if Israel was destroyed by forces of evil (God forbid that this should ever be allowed to happen!)

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure how to (or even if I should) review or grade a book that is effectively a catalogue of Holocaust murders. It's an astonishing, moving and horrifying achievement. Read it, so we never forget.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Holocaust A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War , by prolific historian Martin Gilbert , is the most comprehensive one volume work on the Holocaust out there.
It begins with describing Hitler's rise to power and the history of anti-Semitism in Europe during the 20th century.

It goes on to describe the pogroms against Jews in Germany during the 1930's and the stripping away of their basic human rights.

Gilbert describes Kristallknacht and the destruction of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues.
Gilbert describes how during the Holocaust , Hungary , Italy , Bulgaria and German occupied Denmark attempted to protect their Jews from Nazi genocide. No Jews were deported from Italy to death camps until after the fall of Mussolini and the German occupation of northern Italy in the autumn of 1943.

The main theme of this book is hundreds of eyewitness accounts of the unbelievable horrors perpetrated against Jewish men , women and children by the Nazis and their subordinates during the Second World War , which resulted in the destruction of six million Jews , including 1 and a half million Jewish children. One is numbed by the sheer horror and bestiality of it all, as page after page is filled with graphic inhuman cruelty and bloodshed.

Particularly heartrending is the way children were treated by the Nazis.
It is from eyewitness accounts that we discover how the SS used to amuse themselves by swinging Jewish children by their legs and then flinging them to their deaths. Another eyewitness Maria Hochberg-Marianska desribed the fate of Jewish children during the mass deportations in Cracow in March 1943 :
"At Midday cars drove up before the institution. The Gestapo men flung themselves upon the children. Little ones , three years of age , were flung into baskets and placed on platforms or hoisted on to carts. The older children were driven off to Plac Zgody , flanked by armed soldiers. There they joined the grown ups. The baskets with the little ones were emptied behind the city like so much rubbish. There they were thrown into a ditch , most of them alive. Some were killed with a blow by a rifle butt before burial."
During the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto several hundred small children were shot in the entrance to one of the houses , and several hundred old people were killed in the street. So we continue to read of the mass executions and torures and horrors inflicted on the Jews of Europe in these times.
We read accounts of Mengele's horrific experiments on adults and children , and of Jews of all ages being thrown into furnaces ,and of course the mass executions of millions of men , women and children in gas chambers and by shooting and then throwing the bodies and half-alive survivors into pits...
It is simply impossible to document how one feels reading page after page , these accounts of the scope of inhumane monstrosity
Also disturbing is the section on how after Nazi Germany was defeated , hundreds of Jews were slaughtered by anti-Semitic Poles , and how Soviet soldiers enaged in the rape of Jewish girls who had survived the concentration camps.
One of the photos in the photograph panels is a heartbreaking picture of a four year old little Jewish orphan girl , shot to death with six other Jews by an anti-Semitic Pole , just after the war.
As well as the six million Jews murdered , another ten million non-combatants were killed by the Nazis , including a quarter of a million gypsies and millions of Poles , Czechs , Serbs , Russians , French , Italians and Greeks.
Poles , Czechs , Serbs were to become subject people of the Germans in the New Order but only the Jews were singled out to be destroyed in their entirety . Every single Jewish man , women and child was to disappear so that there would be no Jewish life in Europe.
Some of the parallels with early Nazi anti-Semitism and the new anti-Semitism of the 20th century , are chilling.

For example the boycott of all Jewish shops , cafes and businesses in the 1930's in Germany is echoed by the calls for sanctions and divestment against Israel and for boycotts of Israeli products and businesses , by academics , far-left politicians and trade unions , around the world today.Also , the cultural , professional and academic boycotts of Jews in Europe then , are echoed by the cultural , professional and academic boycotts of Israel and Israelis , including the banning of Israeli scholars and research today in various universities across the world , including North America and Europe.

70 years ago the cry of the anti-Semites in Europe was 'Jew , go to Palestine!' . Today the cry of anti-Semites (Yes-anti-Semites!) around the world is 'Jew-Out of Palestine'. The book documents how between 1929 and 1939, with the rise of Nazism in Germany , a new wave of 250,000 immigrants went to the Land of Israel (Palestine) , the majority of these, 174,000, arrived in Palestine between 1933-1936, after which increasing restrictions on immigration by the British made immigration clandestine and illegal.

In 1933 in reaction to the arrival of Jewish refugees in Palestine , Arab attacks on Jews were launched , and continued unabated until 1939.
Nazi broadcasts beamed to Palestine , Syria and Egypt helped ensure Arab hostility helped ensure that Arab hostility towards the Jewish refugees from Nazism would be kept as high as possible. In response to Arab terror , and afraid of alienating Arab support , the British blocked hundreds of thousands of Jews , attempting to flee Nazi terror , to enter Palestine.
History has shown that when anti-Semitism is allowed to spread beyond the cesspool of the mind that contains it, slaughter of innocents and the destruction of entire nations seem inevitably to follow. Today, Israel is about the size of the state of New Jersey, with a Jewish population of less than 1% of the world's population. Yet, Iran's president says the Holocaust is a "myth" and Israel "must be wiped off the map."-which would mean the genocide of another 5 million Jews , nearly half of the world's Jewish population . Over half of all Holocaust survivors today live in Israel (as do many descendants of Holocaust survivors), and it would be a hideous twist of history for these too to perish in the flames of anti-Jew hatred, as they would do if Israel was destroyed by forces of evil (God forbid that this should ever be allowed to happen!)

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holocaust Martin Gilbert, without a doubt this was the roughest, toughest meanest as guts book I've ever tackled, it took so long to finish at times
I had to take breaks away from it. You could not even imagine the horrors Jews endured, a statistic I worked out to get my head around its scope, 6 million dead for nearly 6 years works out to 83,333 per month, 2,736 deaths per day 114 per hour, Ive never read a work of fiction that compares and yet this is non fiction, just staggers belief, we as a species can sink to such depths is out of it. Can this happen again? where to next? and what does it look like after it happens again? Mental we blame others for our problems because we are to lazy to work at doing better ourselves, I better quit now getting preachy, go on, go away now. Picked up a battered old brick sized book from an op shop.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well so much for New Year's resolutions. Every year on December 31st I get out my journal for that year, write down the "high or low" lights of the year, whatever comes into my head in any order for a few minutes, then I start on my resolutions. Now to do my resolutions every year I have to turn to the last year's resolutions to remind myself what they should be. This doesn't seem to be the way it should work, but that's how I do it. Whether I keep them is anyone's guess especially mine. This last year however, being such an unusual year - hopefully - one of the resolutions I made was to be more positive. I am not a positive person and have no desire to be, always happy people get on my nerves, but it is so dark around here, I am hoping to cheer up those around me at least a little. Going no where near anyone is helping with that. It seems the virus is helping me with my resolution. But my resolution is to be more positive and so the first book I read is The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert. How in the world am I supposed to be cheerful after this? This book was horrible, oh I don't mean the writing and all that stuff I never have a clue about, it was just horrible to read. Since I am not at all sure what to say, I'll start with some of the things on the back of the book:

A formidable achievement...an eloquent record...He has also used his professional skills as a historian...to weave the scattered and often fragmentary evidence into seamless narrative." - The New York Times

"An impressive achievement of reconstructing the details of the darkest, as well as the most elusive event in modern Jewish history." - Jewish Books in Review

"Indispensable for the material it contains, for the soundness of its scholarship, and for Gilbert's ability to narrate and present this history in a style that bears the weight of the subject matter." - The Christian Science Monitor

Now you know how good the book is by people other than me, I just say it's horrible. I kept asking myself, and anyone around who would listen, the same question. Why? Get ready to enter the world of the horrible:

On the eve of Jewish New Year, squads of young Stormtroops attacked Jews returning from synagogue. An eye-witness recorded how, in one incident, 'while three youths beat an elderly gentleman with their fists and rubber truncheons, five other young men stood around to protect them."

Why? Hitler wasn't standing there watching them, he wouldn't have known what they did, they wouldn't get in trouble for not doing it, so why did they?

"A Jewish mother had bought an egg from a Polish peasant so that her child would not die of hunger. Both mother and peasant were hanged; the bodies left hanging for two or three days"

Why? Hitler isn't there, they don't have to do it.

"Jews were placed alive in anti-tank trenches about two kilometres long and killed by machine guns. Lime was thereupon sprayed upon them and a second row of Jews was made to lie down. They were similarly shot. Six more times, a new line of Jews were driven into the trench. Only the children were not shot. They were caught by the legs, their heads hit against stones and they were thereupon buried alive."

Why? And who are the people they manage to talk into doing this?

"Sometimes Grot would have himself a joke; he would seize a Jew, give him a bottle of wine and sausage weighing at least a kilo and order him to devour it in a few minutes. When the 'lucky' man succeeded in carrying out this order and staggered from drunkenness, Grot would order him to open his mouth wide and would urinate into his mouth."

He had a trusted assistant in this work: his dog, Barry, a wild beast the size of a pony, well trained and obedient to the short, brutal orders of his master. When he heard Grot cry 'Jude!', the dog would attack his victim and bite him on his testicles."

This had me wondering where this Mr. Grot is right at this moment. Oh, I know he is probably dead, but where is he now. And I almost forgot, why are they doing this? Hitler is barely ever mentioned so they can't be afraid of him if they don't do these things. I have more places in the book marked, but I'm sick of this, it's too horrible. We all know it eventually ends, but not for a long, long time. And until the Allied armies walk into these places, it goes on and on. And until that day nothing good ever happens. Never, there is never a time when the Nazi's and their companions decide to do the right thing, let one person alone, let one person go free, not once that I can remember. And there you have it, all I'm going to say about it anyway. At the end I was left thinking that people can be made to believe anything, follow anyone, and do anything no matter how horrible. And I still don't know why.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Instead I would recommend "The Holocaust : The Fate of European Jewry 1932-1945" by Leni Yahil which i think will become the standard history. Gilbert catalogues the individual horrors in an unceasing page after page torrent of horror and misery, and with this subject, if you do not strive for a measure of dispassion and objectivity, you will drown. Gilbert's book drowns the reader. Yahil's book gives the reader the big picture - the huge picture - and the necessary details.

[Dem · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book and very well researched, an in depth study of the Holocaust.

[Meaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a tour-de-force of history. Martin Gilbert had an ambitious project -- cover the whole Holocaust from the pre-Hitler days to after the war, all over Europe -- but he was able to accomplish his ends without either glossing over anything or making it too long. I was dizzied by the number of sources he quoted. The guy really knows how to write, too, and put his sources together into one coherent narrative.

Two caveats: Gilbert transliterates proper names strangely. For example, Tuvia Bielsky is called "Tobias Belsky." Also, the book was written over 25 years ago and is a little dated as a result; a lot of research has been done since then. Has he put out a second edition? In the meantime, Martin Gilbert is my new superhero.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most horrific books I have ever read, because it's true. The passage of time generally removes much of the emotion from history, but not with the Holocaust and not with this book. I found myself in tears within ten pages and pretty much cried my way through its entirety. It left me shaken and disturbed, as it should.

If you want to really feel what the Holocaust was like, to see snapshots from lives, to experience the sheer inhumanity and horror of the Nazi death-camps, to see what human beings are really capable of, read this book. I guarantee it will haunt you for the rest of your life.

[Pbwritr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Fantastically researched. From beginning to end, chronologically, explains how the Jews became the group targeted by Hitler. Methodically describing how Jews were hunted down and executed village by village, rounded into ghettos, sent to labor camps and death camps. First the numbers were small, and this book imprints upon one the realization of how many times several thousand people had to be executed to reach 6 million Jews and 6 million others. Horrifying. The systematic, efficient, and planned program of the Nazis is hard to fathom. This also shows that, because they were isolated in ghettos, the Jews did not know about the death camps and then refused to believe stories from the few escapees. I also had not realized that the Germans went to such lengths to deceive the Jews and others as to their destination, even when at the gas chamber. Well written, let's the reader see the full horror of it all through facts, without editorializing. Should be a required text.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up because I was looking for more infromation about Bialystok Ghetto, and this book has it. There's a quote from Elie Wiesel on the back of my edition. The quote reads, "This book must be read and reread. It will be painful to you, but you must read it anyway. To know? No. To understand? No, not that either. But simply to remember all those whom the world, once upon a time, tried to forget".

Gilbert's book stops from becoming a death list because of the names that make thier way into the book. In additional to the thousands of less or little known people, Gilbert mentions Saul Friedlander, his own family, Pope John Paul II. It's this weaving of recongizble and everyday that compells the reader of the book to finish.

[Nocturnalux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to come, once the tears stop running down my face.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This chronicle of the atrocities of the Holocaust is a stunning achievement. The figure of 6 million jews killed by the Nazis is a number that is difficult to comprehend, just because of its sheer scale. Books like "If This is a Man" by Primo Levi and "Schindlers Ark" by Thomas Kennealy bring home the reality and bestial horror of life and death in the camps, but just how do you get your head around 6,000,000? A bit less than the whole of London..........meaningless.

Gilbert does his best.....listing in shocking detail as many of the names and locations and numbers in a chronological account of the industrialised slaughter that is unrelenting in its detail. It's a very tough read, but I felt duty bound to complete it and then re-read it. It seems like 1000's are dying on literally every page, but that is its power. If you do the maths........the book has 960 pages....so that's 6,250 people killed per page. Keep that figure in mind as you read......just mind numbingly horrific.

[Mark Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the finest, most comprehensive and beautifully written work on the 20th Century's ultimate nadir. This work should be read by everyone, but like most important works on the 20th Century's darkest period, it will be read by those who least need to read it and will be ignored by those that should read it.

[Anna Kaling · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me 15 months to read The Holocaust. It's not an easy read; it's utterly horrific, and also so filled with dates and names and numbers that it requires close attention. I could only read so much at a time.

I'm sure there are books out there that are easier to read, more of a story than a record, less detailed and more emotive. Maybe that would work better for some of us. But I think the way this book was written is masterful: it's relentless in giving you facts, details, numbers. Relentless like the event itself. There was no light relief for the victims. They weren't treated as individuals with families and stories and rich lives.

In a world where there are alarming numbers of Holocaust deniers, a book like this -meticulously researched, with precise numbers and citations - is important reading.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review 2021: 3/5: My take on this book has changed considerably in seven years. Yes, it details some of the greatest horrors perpetrated by man upon man, but coupled with this well, the whole book was kind of messy. It reads as though Gilbert never really took the time to push forth a cogent viewpoint or argument other than that which can be encapsulated in one word and that word is horror.

For a detailed account of what events took place during The Holocaust, this work still remains unsurpassed. A single volume chronicle of the barbaric events that took place in Europe in the thirties and forties, it can hardly fail to shock, disgust and appall any reader. But at this point in my reading life, I'm really looking for something more.

On a positive note, this certainly makes me conscious of my development as a reader and in particular the strengthening of my critical faculties when it comes to reviewing a work of fiction or non-fiction literature.



Review 2014 5/5:The Holocaust is an emotive topic to say the least. It is also one on which numerous books have been written. I've read a few myself as well as finding nuggets of information within books which cover the Second World War in a more general sense. It's easy to think you know most of what there is to know on such a subject, once you've read a few books on it and that's kind of the position I held before I commenced reading this.

I was quickly proved utterly incorrect in this assumption, which with hindsight now seems foolish and naive. All too often a book such as this is classified in critiques as definitive, exhaustive, or a testament to the individuals involved. What sets this apart is the simple fact that all these accolades apply to this book in spades. I will not read another book on the Holocaust without benchmarking it against this one. It's breadth and depth is incredible. Gilbert succeeds in striking a perfect balance between historical narrative and personal testimony.

Although simmering under the surface long beforehand, it was the steady rise of power held by the Nazi's in 1930's Germany which provided the backdrop against which persecution against the Jews of Europe began to heighten in ferocity. Beginning with the death of the first eight Jews of the Nazi era on New Years Day 1930, at the hands of Hitler's SA brownshirts, the shocking extent of this persecution is underlined by the examples related by Gilbert. There are many aspects of The Holocaust which this book shone a light on and of which I was previously ignorant. One of these was Hitlers redefinition of the term 'Jew' to suit his own prejudices. Such prejudices related to an individuals blood line, their ability to trace their ancestry back to 'true' Germanic origins and thus enter the hallowed halls of Aryan brotherhood. Thus, those Christians who had converted from Judaism found themselves victims of the same treatment meted out to religious Jews. Through such knowledge, my horror at Nazi policies was ratcheted up a level. The acquisition of fresh historical information such as this did not end there but continued apace through the full length of the book. It's beyond words to explain what makes this book so distinctive and memorable but this is one contributory factor.

The other is the 'spirit' of some Jewish individuals, not only those which survived, but often those who perished. Many of the most beautiful tales were those of passive resistance, whereby victims marched off to certain death with a refusal to bow down, to kowtow or be humiliated.


There are too many jaw-dropping moments, times when I shook my head in wonderment and asked myself 'How? how? How?' before continuing to read. That's what sets this book apart, it's 'babushka-like' reveal upon reveal upon reveal, mimicking the nested Russian painted dolls. The deeper I penetrated the book, the more new information I discovered, the more touched I was by the horrors inflicted and the further my jaw dropped, until by the time I finished, I had to wait five minutes before stretching down and using one hand to lift my lower jaw from the carpet. It's a true testament to the Holocaust and a book that should not only be read but should remain on the shelf to be revisited on future occasions, when you need a reminder of the horrors man can perpetrate upon man.

[Tracy Neu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I gave this book 5 stars, even though I couldn’t finish it right now, not through any fault of the book. I just could not get through the horror. This book, more than any other book I’ve read on the holocaust, showed me the unbelievable level of hate. I just can’t imagine hating one person like this, much less a whole group. I visited Dachau a few years ago, and somehow this book got to me, maybe even more than that. I don’t know why. Perhaps because it talks about it happening everywhere. Perhaps because I learned that this horror was perpetrated not just by SS Nazi’s, or small groups of evil people, but by everyday people. That somehow makes it worse, when you think it couldn’t possibly ever be worse. It does make it worse, and scares me very badly. If you want a book that covers it all, this is it.
I will be revisiting this book at a later date.

[Agnes Moritz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took time to read this book. As I just had to pause every now and then because I felt it was hard to breathe. I bow my head to all those souls suffered and lost. I am thankful for reading this, as it is no entertainment, but it allows me to appreciate so much more of what I have been blessed with, and one couldn't even realize, could be so simply lost.

[Bay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mind numbing to read all the way through, but an excellent resource.

[The Final Chapter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mid 3. Gilbert starts by tracing the history of anti-semitism. By the time Luther published his own exhortation to destroy Jewish homes and drive Jews out of the country in 1543, they had already been expelled from England, France, Spain and Portugal. Moreover, in Italy they were confined to a special area of towns, the 'ghetto', and in Tsarist Russia, to a special region of the country. Though such oppression had seemingly halted in Western Europe during the nineteenth century, as Jews were integrated into the political and cultural milieu of each country, in the East they continued to be held as a leech on society to be sporadically cleansed through murderous pogroms. With particular regard to Germany, the first member of the German parliament to be killed in action on the Western Front was Jewish, and man for man the Jewish and non-Jewish casualties were in exact ratio to their respective populations. Moreover, in the aftermath of the First World War, German Jews were prominent in rebuilding the broken nation, with Hugo Preuss, drafting the Weimar Constitution as Minister of the Interior and Walther Rathenau serving as Minister of Reconstruction and then Foreign Minister. Yet, anti-semitism grew once more as a deliberately fanned instrument of scapegoat politics. Central to this was the political programme published in 1920 by the National Socialist Workers' Party - soon to be known as the 'Nazis'. This included the exclusion of Jews from membership of the Nation and such content was partly drafted by Hitler, as yet only number seven in the party's hierarchy. However, one year later, he set up his own group within the party, with these Stormtroops intended to defend party meetings and to launch any political offensive, with their distinctive brownshirts and swastikas. As extremist groups fuelled anti-semitist sentiment, Rathenau, villified for his concluding of a treaty with the Soviet Union, was assassinated in June 1922. So vociferous was Hitler's praise of this act that he was sentenced to a month in prison, while Julius Streicher launched in 1923 'Der Sturmer', a newspaper devoted to portraying the malign Jewish influence. Then, in November of that year, Hitler's failed coup led to his trial for high treason and a 5-year prison sentence. After serving only eight months he was released, by which time he had composed 'Mein Kampf'. Yet, even though the Nazis secured 12 seats in the 1928 elections, there seemed no threat to democracy. Circumstances would favour extremists with sudden soaring inflation and unemployment the following year, and the first Jewish casualties fell in January 1930 as Stormtroops killed eight Jews. To widespread shock, at elections that September, the number of Nazi seats spiralled to 107, making them the second largest political party, and lack of unity between Communist and Socialist parties led to Hitler's election as the compromise candidate for Chancellor in January 1933. Within months the apparatus of state terror together with concentration camps had been established. while the endless raft of Aryan laws would pave the way for the complete disinheritance of all Jews from German life as embodied in the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935. This can best be illustrated by the example given by Gilbert of a Jewish doctor, who having given a blood transfusion of his own blood to an Aryan saving the latter's life, was sent to a concentration camp for 'race defilement'. As war approached, persecution stiffened and not only within Nazi Germany, while the potential sea of refugees led to closure of escape routes, predominantly Palestine. The number of Jews seeking the more final escape of suicide escalated - when German forces entered Paris in June 1940 the Austrian novelist, Ernst Weiss, master of the psychological novel and friend of Freud and Kafka, chose such a path. The fall of Paris would coincide with the arrival of the first internees at Auschwitz, while during October-November 1940 the Warsaw ghetto was established. Though constituting a third of the city's population, the Jews were crammed into an area equivalent to less than 2.5% of the total urban area, while mass deportations from the surrounding towns and villages mushroomed the captive population to nearly half a million. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a tragic turning-point in Nazi policy to the Jews - the systematic destruction of entire communities for which the SS had prepared special killing squads, the 'Einsatzgruppen'. In this they were confident that anti-semitic hatred which flourished in the East could easily fuel mass murder, and they were right. Gilbert reveals that witin a mere five weeks of the invasion, the number of Jews killed exceeded the total number killed over the previous eight years of Nazi rule. In January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, the terms and machinery of the 'Final Solution' w were agreed, and the extermination of the Jewish population of Europe was initiated with far greater savagery. Heydrich would be fatally wounded in Prague in May 1942 by two Czech patriots paracuted in from Britain, and as the reality of genocide became ever more apparent, Jewish resistance stiffened. This culminated with the revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto in April-May 1943. Gilbert should be praised for his thorough research of eye-witness and survivor testimonies which he uses to detail the heinous crimes of the Nazis. The graphic retelling of these crimes makes every page a heart-rending and difficult read. As a reader, the main concern is the comprehensiveness of catalogued massacres, which can innure the reader at times to the magnitude of casualties portrayed. Perhaps, more impact would result from a`more curtailed list which would have made each individual atrocity and testimony more resonant.

[Duarte Rocha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most people remember the figure of how many Jews were killed during the Holocaust, 6 million. This figure is so large that it becomes impersonal unless directly affected by those events. The quote commonly attributed to Stalin “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” seems very applicable to the Holocaust particularly to a modern audience. What this book succeeds in accomplishing is to brutally remind us that each person in those 6 million had a name, a family, a place in society. It seems to have been very well researched, sometimes the details of numbers, dates and places can be overwhelming but I feel it was necessary for the overall theme. This is one book I'll never forget though I may find it too emotionally difficult to read again.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well-written account of the Nazi regime and the cultures and peoples they devastated. This book is very informative; I'd never read a Holocaust atlas before, and after seeing the many different types of information presented, I don't know why books like this aren't more common. I could see specific figures and statistics by country; I saw maps showing the locations of camps, ghettos, and uprisings; some maps showed the journeys of specific people, e.g. Anne Frank and Kitty Hart; some maps showed the popular routes followed by thousands trying to escape persecution. There were also many many photographs, sobering and horrifying. Everyone should read this book.

[A Foxtrotter Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

There were times, while reading this tragic time in history, that I just had to put the book down, even though I didn't want to. It was hard to imagine that people lived in this world that would do such atrocities to fellow human beings, and worse, take delight in it. I do feel it is a must read for all - so history will not repeat itself.

[Marion Husband · Rating 5 out of 5]

How can a reader rate such a book with stars? This is a relentless read that mirrors the relentless of the Nazis actions and shows the enormity of what they and their allies did. Everyone should read this.

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very gritty book. So much research and stories about real people. Very hard to read as of course the subject matter is grim, but the book is excellent. I think everyone ought to know what happened, even though it is hard to read. Will haunt me forever.

[Robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is hard to read because it's like a reference manual. Gilbert could have just entitled the chapters 1939,1940,1941 etc, then listed the locations of the killings then broke the numbers down into men, women and children killed and who killed them. There is very little context.

[Farkette · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's tough to rate this one "I really liked it" based on the content, but the writing was great and the book was extremely informative which is what I was looking for.

[José Van Rosmalen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Martin Gilbert maakte een verslag in woord en beeld van de vervolging en het vermoorden van joden in Europa door de nazi’s. Het is een feitelijke weergave van een van de gruwelijkste misdaden uit de geschiedenis van de mensheid. Het is tegelijk ook een indringend portret van mensen, zowel van de daders als van de slachtoffers. Zes miljoen Joodse mensen werden vermoord, dat is zes miljoen keer een uniek mens. Het boekje combineert de grote lijnen met de individuele tragiek. De zorgvuldige documentatie maakt dat het verhaal onontkoombaar is.