100 books like The Years of Extermination

How could ordinary policemen be implicated in the Holocaust by participating in mass shootings of Jews? After SS leader Heinrich Himmler took over the police forces in 1936, he was able to call up regular (i.e., non Nazified) police battalions and order them into Nazi-occupied Poland.

The historian Browning's book is based on the post-war interrogations of some of these policemen for trial. Browning delves into the reasons they went along with the mass shootings, even though they could have opted out and requested a different assignment.

His gripping analysis shows how peer pressure shapes individuals, and how participation in unspeakable, genocidal crimes becomes possible in an order-based hierarchy.

One of the most difficult facets of Nazism for my college students to grasp is that the Nazis had a sense of ethics and morals. It’s easy to look at the horrors of Nazism, rightfully condemn the Nazis as monstrous, and congratulate ourselves on having the moral and ethical fiber that would never allow us to engage in such atrocities. The thing is, though, that so much of the evil committed in this world is committed by people who think they are doing what’s right. Koonz’s examination of Nazi morals is an uncomfortable read but a necessary one. It forced me and it forces my students to confront the unpleasant truth that evil also has a sense of “moral” and “immoral.”

Even after years of studying the Holocaust, I remain overwhelmed by the enormity of the horrors, and there are still times when I find my faith in humanity wavering and all I can think to ask in anger and confusion is “Why?” I know I’m not alone. Peter Hayes’s masterful book is the result of an entire career centered on asking that very question.  The outcome is an incredibly readable, insightful, and thought-provoking account of the Holocaust that doesn’t shy away from answering the big questions. After reading it, one might still ask “why,” but it won’t be out of frustration, anger, and confusion, but rather out of a desire to keep learning more about one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of humanity.

Reading about the Holocaust in high school and college, it was easy for me to see WWII Europe in a binary of “Nazis vs. Everybody Else.” This book utterly destroyed that illusion, and it remains today one of the most disturbing books I have ever read about the Holocaust. In the summer of 1941, without any prompting from the Nazis, the gentile half of the Polish town of Jedwabne slaughtered the Jewish half of the town in a single day. This truly horrifying story, hidden for over half a century, is a reminder that the evils unleashed by the Nazis did not remain confined to the Germans. The Holocaust occurred on many fronts: the town of Jedwabne was one of them.   

Although Kristallnacht has been the subject of intense scholarly interest, Confino noticed something about the pogrom of 9 November 1938 that previous historians had missed. He noticed that, in addition to plundering and destroying Jewish businesses and homes, burning synagogues, beating, arresting, and killing Jews, the Nazi mobs took particular delight in publicly burning the Hebrew Bible, the foundation of the Judeo-Christian religious and cultural tradition.

By thinking his way inside the Nazi imagination, Confino opened my eyes to the fact that the Nazis sought to create a world without Jews not only by physically exterminating them but also by committing cultural genocide, by seeking to eradicate the Jewish basis of Western civilization. 

There are several major histories of the Holocaust. Each has strengths and weaknesses, but they offer the reader an in-depth view of the events described in this work. The most influential of these histories is Raul Hilberg's The Destruction the European Jews: Revised and Definitive Edition, a three-volume study has also been condensed into a one-volume college edition. It provides an unequaled insight into how the Holocaust was perpetrated. The work is considered magisterial by many scholars of the  Holocaust. Hilberg used German documentation as his major source. He has been criticized by scholars for what they consider an overreliance on German material as well as his depiction of Jewish leadership as inept in responding to the events of the Holocaust. No one, including those who criticize, has written a better or more enduring work. First published more than a half-century ago, it has stood the test of time.

When the Nazis came to power, they were viciously antisemitic, but they had not planned a genocide of the Jews. By 1942, that genocide was their driving purpose. What changed? Schleunes argues that pressures within the Nazi Party and the circumstances of World War II induced an increasing radicalization of the Nazis’ plan for the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust.

The Reich Security Main Office, founded in September 1939, under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich (until his death in 1942), and which included the Security Service and the Gestapo, was the organizational center of the Nazis’ murderous racial policy.

The historian Wildt's book shows how extermination plans were prepared and worked out in this office—in part by young, career-minded academics. Some of them were not just "desk perpetrators" but were directly involved in the mass murder as leaders of the notorious Einsatzgruppen operating in the occupied Soviet territories. One famous case is Otto Ohlendorf, head of Einsatzgruppe D, who openly confessed to killing 90,000 Jews in his trial.

Wildt discusses the post-war trials of these men by the American authorities, as well as the German publics’ growing ambivalence towards the trials.

No one can understand the German Resistance to Hitler without first understanding Nazi Germany — its ideology, its institutions, and its psychology. Grunberger’s concise but comprehensive study of Nazi Germany organized topically provides essential insight into the society in which those who opposed Hitler lived. This book is more valuable than any chronological history of Nazi Germany and exposes just how pervasive and insidious the National Socialist corruption was.

How did Nazi antisemitism affect German Jews? To answer this question Marion Kaplan delves into the social, domestic, and emotional lives of the persecuted one-percent minority. She reveals how Jews felt when hit with yet another restrictive or punitive measure, when neighbors and friends turned away, when deportation loomed. Crucially, the pioneering feminist historian distinguishes between male and female experiences. Having been less involved in professional and public life, women reacted more flexibly to an unprecedented situation than their menfolk. They were less tied to German culture and more capable of grasping the new realities. Even so, when couples and families finally decided to emigrate, it was often too late: potential host countries were reluctant to allow them in, and Nazi antisemitism soon turned into a policy of mass murder.