PDF Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe; 1933-1945 by Raul Hilberg in History

Review

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful. Thorough but definitely professorialBy Catholic MomThis is not really the type of book I would normally buy. It is very dry; and I struggled to follow. I guess I do better with a narrative format; one that has stories and anecdotes that bring the history to life. Hilberg is obviously an historian of the highest level; but there is a reason I love history; but never much enjoyed college history classes. The book is well researched; and I must say that it offered me many great insights. I guess i just need to be more selective with the format I choose. Still; I have to give this a good recommendation; based on the thoroughness and documentary evidence provided.2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe; 1933-1945By A.C.S.Hilberg; the foremost historian on the Holocaust; produces another thoroughly researched; attentive book on the Holocaust. His writings are without judgement per se; he lets the acts speak for themselves. An amazing historian.4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. The most illuminating writer on the darkest period in history.By R. J. FarrerRaul Hilberg is regarded as one of the foremost experts on the Holocaust.His writing is clear; there is no baggage or ideology; just a simple desire to tell the story of the 20th century's worst atrocity.The book is systematic; dealing first with the ideology of Hitler and the senior Nazis who planned the Holocaust and moving on to look at the victims and the perpetrators. Hilberg also describes how many people who were aware of the process of attempted mass murder of all Jews but did little to stop it.The Russian writer and journalist Vassily Grossman; who was among the first to enter the death camp at Treblinka after liberation; was shocked to learn that just a few dozen SS and a slightly larger group of local armed helpers could gas and bury several thousand victims each day. Hilberg goes further than Grossman to explain how many of the victims were tricked into thinking they were going to resettlement in the East. He also explains how even those who knew their fate were broken long before they were rounded-up for the transports. The erosion of health and self-worth was not sudden; for German Jews the process began in 1933 with Hitler's rise to power and the removal of Jews from the civil service. But Hilberg points out that even by 1936; most German Jews still felt 'German'; especially those who had fought with honour in the First World War. For many the turning point; the moment of awful awareness; was in 1938 by which time refuge or escape from the growing violence was harder to achieve.Some Jews made temporary conversion to Catholicism in the hope of being spared. Sometimes this was successful more often the attempt was exposed. Hilberg describes the revulsion of one atheist Jew; fully aware of his fate; for those who sought protection through false conversion.Personally I found the most disturbing passage was Hilberg's description of how so many non-Jewish Croats; Latvians; Estonians; Poles and Ukrainians were eager to help the Nazis to clear ghettos; drive gassing vans; shoot women and children in forest clearings and 'finish-off' the Jewish; Gypsy and Russian wounded. Some were motivated by bitterness and hate; especially those who had experienced Russian domination and cruelty before 1941. Many of these people had been victims of Russian excess in their turn and they held Jews responsible for Soviet 'bolshevism'.Some of the perpetrators were reluctantly drawn into killing and tired of it; making feeble attempts to disengage themselves from the murder machine. But a similar number had a sadistic thirst for it; setting-up gladiatorial contests between inmates; in which both would die. Sometimes the work-camp controllers made prisoners lift huge rocks from one place to another until the strain of this useless work exhausted them. (In his own memoir of being a prisoner in Buchenwald; Bruno Bettleheim points out that this 'hopeless work' was also used by the SS in their own physical training. The difference being that the SS recruit was fit; strong and well fed; the camp inmate starving; weak and louse-ridden).I found the book too grim to read straight-off. It requires concentration then reflection. It is a dire warning to us that the most mundane of people can be drawn into serving a pathological and vicious regime.