A well-researched study of the meeting that determined many major decisions about the Holocaust.
The renowned scholar of Nazi history chronicles the 1942 conference at which the Nazis formed their plans for the mass murder of European Jews.
On Jan. 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Head Office, called a meeting at Wannsee, outside Berlin. German historian Longerich, author of acclaimed biographies of Hitler and Himmler, puts the conference in the context of the Holocaust as a whole. At the time, the Germans had already systematically murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews in territory overrun in the course of the war. The attendees at Wannsee, all high-ranking officials, showed no compunctions about committing their resources to a “final solution” involving the outright extermination of the remaining European Jews. The author puts considerable emphasis on the minutes of the conference, a single copy of which has survived, in a chapter analyzing that record and including a translation; the book also includes the complete minutes in German. One issue was how to deal with those who only had one Jewish parent, which the planners argued could be handled by sterilization. For the most part, however, the plan was to transport Jews to Eastern Europe, where those fit enough would be worked to death on projects like road construction. Women, children, and the infirm or elderly would be killed immediately. The planners originally assumed that the war against Russia would be won swiftly, opening up ample territory for the relocations. When the U.S. entered the war, they accelerated the schedule. “The spectre of a Jewish world conspiracy that dominated Hitler’s vision of the world and that of the Nazi leadership was now increasingly dictating their political actions,” writes Longerich. The author’s academic approach does not lessen the gravity of the often horrific subject matter, though it may reduce the interest for general readers. For Holocaust scholars, this a must-read.
A well-researched study of the meeting that determined many major decisions about the Holocaust.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-883404-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
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 Yorker staff 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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