The Second World War: A Complete History

I find this work a good reference book when reading other books about the holocaust, because events and people appear chronologically, and the author refrains from analysis. Read as a whole, the accumulation of facts show how raw and incomprehensibly cruel it all was, and yet how true.

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. I wish he'd put out a second addition. In the meantime, Martin Gilbert is my new superhero.

A comprehensive one-volume history of the subject from one of the leading authorities. Notable for its leavening of the text with first-hand accounts.

This is not a book you will enjoy reading, but its a must-read nevertheless. This is a relentless pounding with figures, page after page of number, each number representing a human life lost in the worst crime of the 20th century if not all history. Individual names appear and then disappear, the fate of every Jew from even the most obscure villages all over Europe recounted in calm emotionleess tones. This is not a book screaming with anger or seeking revenge, it is a book for proving, with slow relentless logic, that this unspeakable crime actually happened. As I said this is not a book you will enjoy, it will make you squirm, it will make you weep, it will make you boil with rage, but you will remember. That's its purpose and it achieves it admirably

I feel callous giving this book only 3.5 stars, but I attribute this to it not being what I expected. What I was hoping for was something akin to Anne Applebaum's Gulag: a one-volume history of what happened, how it happened, why it happened, and how it was dealt with when it was over. This book is certainly not that. Instead, Gilbert has taken an enormous amount of first-hand experiences and arranged them chronologically to tell an almost day-by-day account of the unfathomable brutality experienced by European Jewry. To weave this all together in such a way is masterful, but it only tells a part of the story. I assume that was his goal, but it leaves me wanting more. Every paragraph has some episode that is unforgettable. It easy to lose sight of the fact that the 6 million murders took place, as Judith Miller says, "one by one by one." This book makes sure you'll never think of the Holocaust that way again. What Gilbert neglects to cover in much detail is the Nazi part of the story. Of course they are front and center as the perpetrators, but little is covered about what ordinary Germans knew. Or how the German culture was ripe ground for this evil to blossom. Or what the millions of valuables stolen were used for. Or how the manpower and resources expended in this psychopathic venture affected the overall war effort. Or what role, outside of Eichmann, those at the top of the Nazi command played. Again, Gilbert obviously wasn't trying to tell that part of the story, but I still can't say I have a true understanding of the Holocaust beside the unbelievable cruelty so many suffered. And, this makes me angry at myself, at 828 pages, after a while, you become numb to it all. I stopped being shocked by what I read. I think this is unfortunate, but natural. A topic like this is so ghastly that, the further we get from WWII, the less people will know about it. In our comfortable American lives, people don't want to remember these awful events of the past. It's why, in my opinion, the moral component of American foreign policy is under attack. If Saddam Hussein was committing mass murder in 1958 I cannot believe there would have been any meaningful debate in the US about our responsibility to remove him and end the genocide. In 2008, after hundreds of thousands have been discovered in mass graves in Iraq, it's a story we never heard about, and think about even less.Two quotes sum it all up for the book: one tells the utter desperation of an entire culture, the other the unyielding faith that so many held until the very end:There is no strength left to cry, steady and continued weeping leads finally to silence. At first there is screaming; then wailing; and at last a bottomless sigh that does not leave even an echo. - Chaim Kaplan, p. 105I have seen them, the dregs of human misery, and I know that through mankind flows a stream of eternity greater and more powerful than individual deaths. - Lena Berg, p. 622

Well written and very well documented.

read this in 1986, and it changed my world. a very factual look at the regime, gilbert presents his information well.