THE EVIL THAT MEN DO: The Story of the Nazis

If any human documents have the power to move and arouse, the victims' and observers' accounts of the Holocaust must be among them. But those quoted and excerpted here would speak more forcefully without Rubin's shrill, italicized references to ""German demons,"" hate ""spewing forth"" from the pulpits, and--as if the word Nazi were not chilling enough--Nazi hordes, Nazi evil, Nazi cancer, etc. All of Rubin's major points--that European anti-Semitism was rooted in early Christianity, that the great mass of Germans were shockingly compliant, that the Americans and Allies declined to rescue more than a relative handful of refugees, that the Jews did resist to the extent that that was possible and the Jewish Councils cannot be blamed--are made with less heat and more documentation (and without such obfuscating concepts as the ""German soul"") in Meltzer's Never to Forget (1976). And despite his title and his assertion that ""this book has been about the choices men and women have made in times of extreme crises,"" Rubin seems more concerned with venting wrath on the demons than with alerting readers to similar occasions for choice that might arise closer to home.