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THE BOMBING OF AUSCHWITZ

SHOULD THE ALLIES HAVE ATTEMPTED IT?

The definitive resource for understanding this deeply troubling episode in the 20th century’s greatest horror. (8 pages...

Essays by military and Holocaust historians (whose answers to the question in the subtitle vary widely), supplemented with relevant primary documents.

Editors Neufeld (The Rocket and the Reich, 1994) and Berenbaum (CEO/Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation) have assembled a myriad of replies to “one of the most basic questions that students of the Holocaust ask” and are faithful to their goal of presenting all sides of the debate. Some, like Neufeld himself, argue that bombing would have been “a failure under any circumstances” (or, in the words of contributor James H. Kitchens, “a chimera”). Contrariwise, Richard G. Davis (among others) submits that attacking the death camp would have sent “the strongest possible message to the Nazis” and “would not have seriously delayed the accomplishment of other goals.” In between these two positions lies the essence of the debate, and an impressive assortment of authorities’ attempts to answer its various questions. Did the Allies know what was going on in Auschwitz-Birkenau? (Yes, but the Nazis had already killed five million Jews by the time the Allies invaded Normandy.) Did Allied bombers have the range to reach the camp deep in Poland? (Yes, but not until early in 1944 when the US established an air base in southern Italy.) Would a raid have been effective? (Virtually everyone acknowledges that bombing in 1944 was highly inaccurate, that multiple attacks would have been necessary, and that innocent inmates—perhaps hundreds or thousands—would have been killed.) Other writers examine the moral issues. Walter Laqueur observes that “saving Jewish lives” was not a high priority; Henry L. Feingold attributes the inaction to “mere indifference or moral obtuseness”; and Deborah E. Lipstadt condemns the bystanders, noting that a person “who takes no action becomes a facilitator.” Wisely, the editors include much of the documentary evidence.

The definitive resource for understanding this deeply troubling episode in the 20th century’s greatest horror. (8 pages b&w photos, 4 maps)

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-312-19838-8

Page Count: 368

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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