The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders

Auschwitz

Laurence Rees · 327 pages

Published for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- a devastating and surprising account of the most infamous death camp the world has ever known. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the site of the largest mass murder in human history. Yet its story is not fully known. In Auschwitz, Laurence Rees reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews with Auschwitz survivors and Nazi perp

Commandant Of Auschwitz

Rudolf Hoss, Primo Levi · 281 pages

Rudolf Hoess was the notorious Commandant of Auschwitz. Imprisoned and awaiting execution after the war, Hoess wrote a long memoir, a self-serving account of his life and approaches to management. The amoral sensibility Hoess displayed regarding all that went on in the charnel factory where the industrialization of death was practiced--where probably 3 million people were literally worked to death

Night

Elie Wiesel · 126 pages

Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination, 1939-1945

Saul Friedlander · 896 pages

Examines the anti-Semitism that led to Nazi Germany's attempts to exterminate Europe's Jewish population, focusing on the people and events from the Nazi accession to power in 1933 to the onset of World War II.

Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust

Richard Rhodes · 343 pages

In Masters of Death, Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen's role in the Holocaust. These "special task forces," organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by sho

The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

Robert Jay Lifton · 561 pages

Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling

Mark S. Smith · 256 pages

More than 800,000 people entered Treblinka, and fewer than seventy came out. Hershl Sperling was one of them. He escaped. Why then, fifty years later, did he jump to his death from a bridge in Scotland? The answer lies in a long-forgotten, published account of the Treblinka death camp, written by Hershl Sperling himself in the months after liberation and discovered in his briefcase after his suici

Escape from Sobibor

Richard Rashke · 412 pages

It was the scene of the biggest prison escape of World War II, yet hardly anyone has heard of Sobibor, one of three Nazi death camps in eastern Poland, where six hundred Jews revolted against their guards and broke through the walls. Three hundred of them made it to the woods of Sobibor, the forest of the owls. Because the Nazis destroyed all the physical evidence and all but three documents about

Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz

Shlomo Venezia, Beatrice Prasquier · 202 pages

This is a unique, eye-witness account of everyday life right at the heart of the Nazi extermination machine. Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first w

The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945

Wladyslaw Szpilman · 224 pages

A Jewish pianist's real-life account of survival in World War II Warsaw. Separated in a mêlée, he fights to rejoin his family as they board the death train, but police block him. "Papa!" he cries. The father waves, "as if I were setting out into life and he was already greeting me from beyond the grave."

Treblinka

Jean-Francois Steiner · 415 pages

"Nearly a million Jews were consumed by the ovens of Treblinka before August 2, 1943. On that day 600 prisoners armed with stolen guns and grenades attacked the Nazi guards, burned the camp, and fled into the nearby Polish forests. Of these, forty survived to bear witness to man's courage in the face of the greatest evil human history has produced."

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

William L. Shirer · 1,264 pages

The Rape of Nanking

Iris Chang · 304 pages

In December 1937, in what was then the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking (Nanjing) and within weeks not only looted and burned the defenseless city but systematically raped, tortured, and murdered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians. Amazingly, the story of this atrocity - on

Schindler's List

Thomas Keneally · 429 pages

In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mer

The Complete Maus

Art Spiegelman · 296 pages

The definitive edition of the graphic novel acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal) and “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker) • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • One of Variety’s “Banned and Challenged Books Everyone Should Read”A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever writte

The Last Jew of Treblinka

Chil Rajchman · 138 pages

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

Miklos Nyiszli · 160 pages

See work: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15671648W

Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family

Miep Gies, Alison Leslie Gold · 252 pages

For the millions moved by Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, here at last is Miep's own astonishing story. For more than two years, Miep Gies and her husband helped hide the Franks from the Nazis. Like thousands of unsung heroes of the Holocaust, they risked their lives each day to bring food, news, and emotional support to the victims. From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refuge

Escape from Auschwitz

Rudolf Vrba, Alan Bestic · 359 pages

Remember Us: From My Shtetl Through the Holocaust

Vic Shayne · 324 pages

Follows the life story of Martin Small from the work camp to the concentration camp of Mauthausen, to being a partisan of the Nowogrodek forests, and to life as a displaced person in Italy, and from fighting the Egyptian army in a tiny Israeli kibbutz in 1948 to starting a new life in a new world in New York. This account is based on talks Martin Small gave to audiences across the country and to c

Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land

Sara Nomberg-Przytyk · 191 pages

"From the moment I got to Auschwitz I was completely detached. I disconnected my heart and intellect in an act of self-defense, despair, and hopelessness." With these words Sara Nomberg-Przytyk begins this painful and compelling account of her experiences while imprisoned for two years in the infamous death camp. Writing twenty years after her liberation, she recreates the events of a dark past wh

KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

Nikolaus Wachsmann · 880 pages

"Wachsmann offers an ... integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of 1945. The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system that tells the full story of its broad development and the everyday experienc

Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World

Jan Karski · 391 pages

Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State stands as one of the most poignant and inspiring memoirs of World War II and the Holocaust. With elements of a spy thriller, documenting his experiences in the Polish Underground, and as one of the first accounts of the systematic slaughter of the Jews by the German Nazis, this volume is a remarkable testimony of one man’s courage and a nation’s struggle for re

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

Timothy Snyder · 480 pages

"It comforts us to believe that the Holocaust was a unique event. But as Timothy Snyder shows, we have missed basic lessons of the history of the Holocaust, and some of our beliefs are frighteningly close to the ecological panic that Hitler expressed in the 1920s. As ideological and environmental challenges to the world order mount, our societies might be more vulnerable than we would like to thin