What more can be said about the Holocaust? Much, but it is not said here, though Benz is one of Germany’s leading Holocaust scholars. Instead, this is a simple, straightforward account, chronologically told, of the central event of this fast-closing century. Touted somewhat alarmingly by its publisher as Holocaust history from the “German perspective,” this is by no means an apologist work. Benz (Antisemitism Research/Technical University of Berlin; The Jews of Germany, 1933—1945, not reviewed) clearly recognizes that the Holocaust was an event of a monstrosity unimaginable to most—though unfortunately not to the Nazis. He opens with the infamous Wannsee conference of January 20, 1942, correcting the common misapprehension that it was here the Nazis decided upon the Final Solution, which in fact had already been “settled.” Benz also elliptically alludes to the mass collusion of ordinary Germans, reminding us that people all over Germany could hear Thomas Mann’s radio broadcasts from London, which informed Germans what the Wehrmacht and Nazis were doing in occupied Europe. From the Wannsee Conference, the author retreats into the immediate past to examine Nazi policy toward the Jews and the increasingly difficult and dangerous conditions under which German Jews lived. He delineates the rapid and, in hindsight, inevitable progression from stripping Jews of their civil rights to sending them to the gas chambers. Benz also provides excellent coverage of the ghettos in occupied eastern Europe, the massacres carried out by the Einsatzgruppen on the eastern front, and the near-genocide of the Sinti and Roma people. He raises but does not address the “intentionalist” vs. “functionalist” debate (intentionalists believe Hitler always intended to exterminate the Jews, while functionalists believe the Holocaust was an exigency created by the chaos of war) and makes no mention of the euthanasia program that both chronologically and psychologically preceded genocide. Cursory, but competent.
Pub Date: April 2, 1999
ISBN: 0-231-11214-9
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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.
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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