The Holocaust

Doris L. Bergen, professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto, has written perhaps the best concise history of the Holocaust published to date. She provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to this complex subject. Writing with clarity and sensitivity, and based on the latest research, she places the Holocaust in its historical, cultural, social, and military contexts. The narrative is powerful and engaging, and the analysis is balanced and compelling. In this compact volume, fully illustrated with photographs and maps, Bergen covers all the major issues surrounding the Holocaust. She discusses not only the persecution of the Jews, but other groups victimized by the Nazis: Gypsies, the disabled, Poles, Soviet POWs, homosexuals, and political opponents of the regime. She also provides firsthand accounts from perpetrators, victims, and eyewitnesses thus adding the human dimension of the tragedy that is so often left out of other textbook treatments of the subject. The book is very readable, compelling and informative and highly recommended to expert and novice alike. * Jewish Book World *
A striking introduction to the complexity of Holocaust history—precisely because despite being a very short book it does not in any way attempt to evade the complexity and context for Nazi violence against Jews. . . . It is an impressive introduction to the Holocaust which will certainly serve its readers well. * Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal Of Jewish Studies *
A meticulous, sensitive account of the Nazi race wars that combines a powerful narrative and explanatory drive at the same time as it illuminates individual lives and fates with searing precision. While giving full weight to the antisemitic core of Nazi racism, Bergen also shows why it claimed so many other groups of victims, and pursues it to its appalling climax in the wars of imperialist conquest and exploitation launched in 1939. This is a distinctive and remarkable achievement, as assured as it is readable. -- Jane Caplan, University of Oxford