The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews

By David Engel

Book Overview

This book offers a survey of the encounter between the Third Reich and European Jewry. Pointing out the difficulties historians face in interpreting the ever-expanding documentary record, it includes... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0582327202
• ISBN13: 9780582327207
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 148 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Another solid attempt to answer the question, "Why did the Holocaust take place?"

While anti-Semitism was an integral component of European civilization for centuries, by the start of the twentieth century it had largely been submerged in Western Europe. Many Jews fought on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I and considered themselves more German than Jewish. Therefore, it is a mystery why the Nazi movement was able to harness the entire machinery of a modern state in the drive to systematically kill every Jewish person that could be gathered up. The purpose of this book is to examine that mystery and attempt to answer it, a goal that is at least partially met. Ironically, one of the reasons why the killing machine was so effective is that so many people, including Jews, found it difficult to believe that the Holocaust was actually happening. One point that is examined in detail is whether the extermination of the Jews in Europe was actually part of the original plans of the Nazi party and the German government. As amazing as it sounds, there is a good deal of evidence to indicate that extermination was not the original plan, but was a policy that evolved. That is a hard point to accept, it seems difficult to believe that killing six million people on a series of assassination assembly lines would be a policy that just seemed to develop. One of the most fascinating aspects of the Holocaust is how few Germans actually were actively killing Jews, most of the "dirty work" of stripping corpses, controlling the prisoners and other details was performed by the Sonderkommando, prisoners given special privileges until they were replaced by a new group. The first act of the new Sonderkommando group usually was to kill their predecessors. The reality is that a complete understanding of how the Holocaust came about will almost certainly never be known. However, that does not mean that the effort should not be made, in fact it must be. For when each new facet is understood, humanity is that much closer to developing a mechanism so that it will never recur. This book is a fundamental brick in the building of that wall of protection.