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 enlarge | Author: Saul Friedlander
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $11.05
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Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 16480
Media: Paperback
Pages: 896
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 5.9 x 1.9
ISBN: 0060930489
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5318
EAN: 9780060930486
ASIN: 0060930489
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Showing reviews 6-10 of 23
 A Dantean Tour of Holocaust Hell by master chronicler Saul Friedlander July 2, 2008
C. M Mills (Knoxville Tennessee)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Nazi Germany and the Jews is a two volume set on Nazi Germany's satanic persecution and murder of six million Jews. Volume I deals with the years of persecution suffered by the Reich's Jews from Hitler's takeover of the state in 1933 until the outbreak of World War II in September 1939.
Saul Friedlander is a survivor of the Holocaust growing up as a Jew in occupied France.Friedlander teaches the Holocaust at UCLA. His second volume "The Years of Extermination:1939-1945" is destined for classic status as one of the essential books on this most lamentably horrible time in European and human history. The book is over 700 pages in length and reads quickly due to the author's abilities to tell the tragic story with clarity and dispassionate reportage.
With the conquest of Poland the Nazis established countless concentration camps in conquered territory. By 1941 with the Nazi's invasion of the Soviet Union and the entry of the United States the final solution decision was made to kill all of the Jews in Europe. Himmler and Heydrich of the SS with their underlings such as Eichmann began to put this murderous and ungodly plan into execution. Millions of Jews, Gypsies, POW's, political dissidents, Communists and others died in the gas chambers of hellholes such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblenka and Sobibor. I learned from this book that at the end of the war the Nazi marched almost one million Jewish prisoners Westward causing more untold murders and savageries. This book will boggle your mind with horror and make you aware of the heart of darkness which beat in the heart of the merciless mechanical beast known as Nazi Germany.
Friedlander teaches us that Europe was an Anti-Semitic atmosphere but in Germany Hitler used this prejudice to seize power. Hitler believed the Jews were behind Communism and was a rabid amoral leader who would brook no mercy for Jewish men, women or children. We see the cruel Nazi night seize the light of life in every occupied nation from France to Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Scandinavian Countries, Greece & the Balkans and any place Jews could be found.
Rather than a dry recounting of facts the author also includes poignant diary entries from Jews who suffered the persecutions and in most cases death at the hands of the Nazis. The most insightful diaries, in my opinion, were those of Anne Frank in Holland and Victor Klemperer who was married to an Aryan German woman. Friedlander also includes first person reports of atrocities by German soldiers, civilians and top Nazi figures such as the Mephisto Joseph Goebbels the master of Nazi Propoganda.
Friedlander's book is not perfect. Maps and illustrations would add greatly to future editions. One prays that such an event will never take place again. This book is a testament and witness to the shoah victims whose six million voices speak through the words of an excellent historian of a black chapter in our race's time on this earth.
A magnum opus June 17, 2008
S. P. Hersh (Long Island, NY)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
A truly monumental work that simply outpaces many other related literary endeavors appearing over the past 30 years. Reads easily and without the stodgy encumbrances of many history books. A must read for anyone interested in the Holocaust.
 Doesn't live up to some reviews June 9, 2008
Daniel C. Dennis (Brisbane)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
This massive work is a disappointment in style. The writer's prose seems calculated to make the reader's work difficult, and there is no excuses for one who knows the pitfalls of academic writing to quickly breach the first rule of research-based treatises - don't burden the language by turning three or four sentences into a single one. The book is constructed from language so cluttered, with sentences so convoluted, that the narrative is weakened and folowing the exploration of causality (the real point of the book)becomes more and more frustrating. The tangled prose is one thing. Another is the self-referencing ("as we shall see," "when we previously met them in an earlier chapter," "later,this will be exlored in full") which somehow got past the subs. The only memorable prose is the searing quotations of those who were consumed first by hopelessness and then by the machinery of murder. One cannot help but recall Primo Levi's assertion that the best witnesses of the Holocaust were consumed by it.
At the end of reading this book, it is difficult to recall lines of thought, apart from the public nature of Hitler's determination to wipe out European Jewery, and the nature of the Vatican's indifference, which bordered on complicity. But this has been covered elsewhere and to better effect. So I found it hard to warrant the claims made by some reviewers that the book contained revelations. If you are looking for clearly expounded research that provides a memorable reading experience, this book is not the last word.
Magnum Opus June 4, 2008
Valentin Prokopets (Philadelphia, PA USA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
In April of 2008 this book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. This fact alone is a reliable indicator that the work is of high quality and it is absolutely worth dedicating oneself to its 663 pages. It is a massively researched tome by a UCLA professor of history of the darkest and most cruel period of the 20th century: the Holocaust. In fact, as far as I know, the only comparable time in our recorded history is the Spanish Inquisition. It's very sad indeed that the most sadistic individual to ever walk on this planet can realistically be compared to the tribunals set up in the name of the church.
Many people possess the notion that the Holocaust was all Adolph Hitler's doing. Such false concept is prevalent throughout the world and is decisively disproved by the author. Anti-Semitism permeated not only the Third Reich but all of Europe for millennia. Professor Netanyahu in his magnum opus The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain traces it as far back as the 6th century B.C. Later in the Roman Empire Jews surrendered Jesus Christ to the proconsul of Judea for execution and this latter act has evolved into anti-Semitism that has been witnessed in Europe ever since. Unfortunately for millions of European Jews, Hitler's ascend to chancellorship procured him political and military means to carry out his diabolical blueprint to exterminate that ancient race. However, nearly everyone in the Nazi party was anti-Semitic, that's why the extermination crusade went so smoothly, stumbling on no resistance within the German bureaucratic circles. Initially the campaign was carried out "diplomatically" so no considerable protest was made by the German people either. Hitler's ambitions for the Reich were almost sacred in the eyes of the Germans and they followed him blindly, transgressing upon the most fundamental right of every man: the right to live. And it is naive to contemplate that they did not realize the magnitude of their sinister deeds, for the dynamics of the killing changed with time to cover the massacres.
But let's briefly examine other European nations during the period of German occupation. The only people to explicitly declare their repugnance for the anti-Jewish laws were the Dutch. The Dutch were considered Arian by Hitler's racial doctrines and that's why they were allowed some autonomy when it came to governing themselves. So when they began protesting the persecutions it had to be handled delicately and covertly. In other European countries the process was not impeded by the conquered peoples. As I mentioned above, anti-Semitism had been part of the European society for a very long time and constant deportation and annihilation of the Jews did not incite any pity, at least not in the beginning. Even the Church, that benevolent institution, the advocate of human rights and needs, did not exert any substantial influence to stop the genocide. In fact, the Church had been the most infamous persecutor of Jews for centuries, hence during the years of the extermination being passive in the face of such mass murder was perfectly within its guidelines of conducting business.
I wish to believe that the Western civilization has reached the apex in evolution of human rights. It's difficult to conceive a second Holocaust; it has only been 63 years since the first one ended. Many would say the same about another global war; however, I'm convinced that the creation of nuclear arsenals by the leading nations of planet Earth would only give us two options in case of titanic military escalation between nuclear powers: total annihilation or no world war. Genocides, on the other hand, will never cease to exist. As I am writing this, a genocide is being executed in Sudan and as with every genocide, any action to halt it is delayed. We may create a thousand Nurembergs, Geneva Conventions, or Tokyo trials, not deterring many who wish to perpetrate such crimes against humanity. International tribunals cannot change human nature.
Amazing May 17, 2008
David W. Nicholas (Montrose, CA USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have never read anything by Saul Friedlander before. I'm not really a Holocaust historian, though I've read a few books on the subject. I tend to be more of a student of World War II history in general, and of the military aspects of things in particular. This book, however, attracted me because it won the Pulitzer, and frankly it doesn't disappoint: it's well-written, judicious, and very intelligent and comprehensive, and the author does an excellent job of putting everything in context and explaining what occurred.
The book begins with the start of the War, and discusses first the various efforts to resettle Germany's Jews, the dilemma the regime encountered when they conquered Poland, and finally the solution that they came up with to deal with the issue: extermination. The author discusses each period fairly objectively, frankly more objectively than I would have thought possible. Objectively, of course, Hitler and the Nazis wind up being described as insane mass-murderers. The author moves seamlessly from the discussion of various measures that were taken towards extermination with the diaries of various Jews who were caught in the Holocaust, and of various German soldiers and civilians who commented on how the Jews were treated.
This is a very very good book. It's hard to imagine saying you enjoyed reading it: it's a chronicle of mass murder, after all. But the book is extremely well-written and documented, and the facts are remorseless in their clarity. The author puts to bed two hoary old myths that have troubled me for years: most of the German population had at least some idea what was going on, and there was no propaganda or cynical aspect to the Nazi ideology: they were really that anti-semitic, and would have been even if opposed by the populace.
I would recommend this book to almost anyone interested in the Holocaust or 20th Century history.
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