Rating: 
Summary: This is the best book you'll ever hate
Review: The scale of death, terror, and utter macabre horror contain within the covers of this text document the actions of the SS Sonderkommandos and Einsatzgruppen as they rampaged through out the Eastern occupied territories implementing the first phase of Hitler's and Himmler's final solution. Mr. Rhodes has written a masterpiece that must have almost driven him insane to work on. This text will keep you awake at night and make you shudder and weep. The human feeling conveyed from the pages of this book are much more intense than "Hitler's willing executioners" and the social theory arguments tend to seem more complete but are not thoroughly defended or brought to a believable conclusion. The book ends rather weakly with a brief run down of the fates of the Einsatzgruppen leaders and a brief quote from a survivor of a "Jewish aktion". The social theory and the ending should not be used to judge the value of this book. Reading this book is incredibly hard and depressing; the only good feeling it evoked was pride for the veterans of the war against Germany for surely they were fighting against the darkest of evil. As a person of European (mostly German) heritage, I felt utter disbelief that human beings could have carried out the mass slaughters but the historical record is clear. Entire villages, cities, and countries were rendered "Judenfrei" in the personal, face to face, shooting executions conducted. Men, women, children, even diapered infants were all brutally exterminated, thousands at a time.
This book is essential to understanding the development of the concentration camp system from the actions of the death squads and the history of the Jewish Holocaust. It is a who's who of the beginnings of the Nazi extermination program and contains details that I had not read about previously ("Sardinenpackung" for one chilling example). It documents the impact of the mass murders on the killers who suffered mental breakdowns and other psychological traumas - proof in my mind that they knew what they were doing was illegal and morally indefensible. It also documents the participation of numerous auxiliary units - Romanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian etc. who aided and conducted murders on massive scales as well. The Holocaust may have been a German invention, but the participation and the guilt incorporated much of Europe as well. The social theory of brutalization explains a great deal of how the killers came to be conditioned to accept, participate and even enjoy the daily murders, it does not however satisfy every question that may be raised. I would propose that a total understanding of murder on this scale may never be understood by the civilized world, it simply lies beyond what is comprehensible.
This book damns the Einsatzgruppen with their own reports and letters home, including the infamous Jager report. Men, women, and children were all shot or dumped indiscriminately into killing pits through out Eastern Europe, murder on a massive scale became simply a logistics problem to be solved. Children were murdered in separate pits so that the adult corpses could be better arranged. Tens of thousands were shot in a single day, at a single site by a handful of executioners. The depth of the horror unleashed on the heals of Operation Barbarossa is inconceivable. The true value of this book is so that the future of millions of husbands, wives, grandparents, sons, and daughters should not have been lost in vain. Read this text and you will never be able forget.
Rating: 
Summary: disturbing but necessary history
Review: Rhodes' confronting book, with its extensive descriptions of wartime atrocities, is heavily dependent on secondary sources (carefully acknowledged). But while it does not traverse much new ground, as a succinct and well-narrated account of the operations of SS "special forces" in Eastern Europe, it's a valuable contribution to the literature. One disappointment is the failure of the book to substantiate the claim made in one of the dust-cover reviews, that it provides substantial coverage of both Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the mass murderers. The non-Jewish aspect is only touched on; as though that "advance reviewer" saw a manuscript that's been cut before publishing.
Rating:
Summary: Horrific accounts of Nazi atrocities
Review: This book is as compelling as it is heart breaking, vividly depicting the first-hand accounts of Nazi brutality perpetrated against the Jews. The gifted uathor has, for the most part, allowed the facts to speak for themselves without offering too much personal interjection, but it is his thoughtful and insightful commentary that is missing from this otherwise impressive work.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing.
Review: Until I read this book I had no idea of just how personally involved Hitler and Himmler were in the extermination of Jews. This is the true story of a group of human monsters who should never have been born. Cowardly secret policemen who were sent in behind the waves of front-line Wehrmacht to murder 'undesirables', which basically means Jews. Many of these animals personally murdered thousands of people. How does one atone for such a monumental crime? One thing I found fascinating and satisfying was what happened to many of these men later on. Many of them committed suicide or were murdered by their own people - poetic justice. Read this book and try to imagine yourself a Jew in Poland or Russia. Having just been traumatised by the passing Wehrmacht these gentle people were then set upon by a band of merciless sadistic state-sanctioned killers who either murdered them themselves, or released psycho's from local prisons and encouraged them to slaughter the Jews instead. Not for the weak-hearted.
Rating: 
Summary: Lots of interesting details, like a annotated bibliography
Review: The book reads like it was constructed from thousands of individual index cards. Sudden shifts in focus. Occasional interjections "here's something almost no one else has noticed..." Themes introduced and then dropped. Since it does not appear that Richard Rhodes has done original research in German, Polish, or Russian, the bibliography is a good starting point for those interested in doing their own holocaust research in English.
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Summary: Superb Look At A Horrifying Historical Phenomenon!
Review: This new book by Richard Rhodes is, in my opinion, a quite interesting attempt to exhaustively explore the terrible brutality of the S.S. Einsatzgruppen (Special Group) created under Heinrich Himmler's specific direction to carry out an loosely organized mass extermination of Eastern captive populations as the Wehrmacht pressed into Poland and the Soviet Union during the successive Eastern campaigns. I purposely have used the term "captive populations" to connote that it was a population much more inclusive of local residents, including communist collaborators, dissidents, gypsies, and other "undesirables", targeted for extinction rather than being limited strictly to Jews. It is, I believe, a demonstrable mistake to try to argue that the Third Reich was primarily interested in ridding itself of its Jewish population. Remember, the initial population of Jews so murdered were not deported German Jews, but rather indigenous Jews living in Poland, Estonia, and Lithuania, part of the captive populations. We do well to remember that the Nazis' stated purpose for conducting the entire Eastern campaign was to gain what Hitler often referred to as "Liebenstraum", or "living room" for future German expansion and colonization. Thus, the Third Reich intended from the onset of hostilities in one fashion or another to forcibly displace the native population through a combination of techniques, including extermination, sustained slave labor, and starvation. Historical questions regarding the etiology of the resulting Nazi policy of extermination of European Jews revolve around a single question: was it Hitler's intent from the beginning to do so, or did the policy evolve from pragmatic and existential circumstance? The first line of argument, what is often called the "intentionalist"premise, is that as he stated in "Mien Kampf", the Fuhrer always intended to wipe out the Jewish peoples of Europe, and that his campaign proceeded, cautiously and tentatively at first, more due to political and logistical considerations than with anything else. The opposing argument, regarded to the "functional' premise, finds the genesis of the policy of systematic genocide of the Jews in the welter of events and circumstances that arose from the onset of the Eastern campaign as early in the fall of 1939 when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. This line of thought finds evidence in the Nazi's evolving efforts to employ ever more efficient and effective methodologies to deal with the captive populations of the East. Obviously, for either perspective to continue to have passionate adherants fifty years later indicates that both perspectives have considerable merit. Having said this, I find the so-called "functional" argument more persuasive and more consistent with the bulk of historical record. This perspective is not an fact attempt to attempt to argue that Hitler had no premeditation or predisposition regarding the eventual fate of European Jews and other targeted populations. Rather, it is more an argument as to how the Third Reich planned to capitalize best on the evolving existential circumstances to furhter its own immediate goals and objectives; as to whether it is more useful for the regime to temporarily enslave the subject population and work them to death, or to simply kill them quickly and dispose of them. What the historical record seems to show is that Hitler had given local area political subordinates considerable leeway in managing the dislocation process, especially in the first few months of occupation of Poland. It was the circumstances that arose and the difficulties associated with marshalling sufficient resources to feed, house, and surveil the indigenous captive populations that led to many of the initial efforts at systematic extermination. Otherwise, situations like those that led to the establishment, management, and horrors associated with the Warsaw Ghetto would never have come to pass. All that said, the book does indeed shed considerable light and detail at the devil that was the SS Einsatzgruppen. Sparing no grisly detail, Rhodes takes the reader on a horrifying busman's tour of what Hannah Arendt once described as the banality of evil. For those of us who have read widely regarding the details of the Holocaust, it is precisely this question of how seemingly civilized, educated, and humane individuals could have possibly participated in such activities. It is mind-boggling to imagine the murderous disregard many who did indeed actively engage in such crimes had toward the victims, both while they were perpetrating the murders as well as in retrospect. Many interviewed later voiced no serious qualms about having done so, and seemed to show little collective sense of shame or guilt over such brutal and wanton serial acts of mass murder. In fact, even the SS was taken aback by how little ill effect was demonstrated by the members of Einsatzgruppen, having expected many more psychiatric casualties than were noted. This is an absorbing book, one that very carefully details and describes the horror that was put in place in order to "vacate" the conquered territories for German colonization. One reels at the revelations of how members of the group, as well as the Wehrmacht in general, was systematically conditioned to generally view all Eastern Europeans as less than human, as a subspecies deserving no humane treatment. And the savage treatment dealt out was exactly what was intended, no consideration, no quarter, and no mercy. Eventually, for this they received the whirlwind, for the invading Soviet army was equally as brutal in their treatment of Germans as they eventually swept like a nightmare unleashed all the way into Berlin. This is a book I can highly recommend, but one so serious and so frank in its details that you will likely not "enjoy" reading it.
Rating:
Summary: The Horror
Review: Warning: Richard Rhodes's "Masters of Death" is one of the most horrific books you're ever likely to read. It details very completely the history of the roving death squads who followed Adolf Hitler's armies into the conquered territories of the Soviet Union and unleashed the opening salvos of what would later become known as The Holocaust. Many people today think of The Holocaust in terms of Auschwitz and the other death camps. What tends to be forgotten is that the Eisatzgruppen units that started the mass killings of Jews racked up a death toll at least as high as those of the camps. And in most instances, the murders by these minions were even less humane, if that's possible. Rhodes, a fine writer and first rate historian, pulls no punches. Wherever possible, he uses the first hand accounts of both the survivors and the perpetrators to tell his gruesome story. The ghastly pictures that accompany the book only begin to hint and the true horror of the events described. Along the way, Rhodes explores the psychology of the murderers, particularly that of both Hitler and of Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, the man who allowed his whole personality to be subjugated to the Fuhrer. Rhodes also provides enough of the history and ideology of Nazi Germany to set the proper context. At just under three hundred pages of text, the book makes its point concisely. Lest the reader think that what happened has been confined to the dustbin of history, Rhodes points out that Einsatzgruppen methods were recently resurrected by the death squads in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Overall, an incredibly powerful and important book that serves as a grim reminder of the darker side of human nature.
Rating:
Summary: Unremitting, Important, Well-Written
Review: Richard Rhodes has dealt with violent topics in the past but nothing matches the horrors committed in this book on such a personal level. Masters of Death (The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust) will bring the reader quite close to the horrificly committed mass murders from both the perspectivie of the killers and the victims (of those very few who managed to survive). There is a little pyschobabble near the beginning mixed in with small bios of Hitler and Himmler that does not entirely hold together but it is minimal and, in no way, interferes with the important story told here. The author shows how the killing of Jews in Eastern Europe developed the methods and hardened the men, by making horror routine, to the Holocaust that followed of whiich these first years of killings were a part. This book is an important addition to Holocaust literature by an accomplished writer. This book is both very hard to read and difficult to put down.
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Summary: Horrific expose of nazi culture
Review: I have read many books on the Holocaust, but none was so gripping as this one. While the horror of individual death is tragic, the complete eradication of entire villages, towns and cities is beyond belief. The cold, callous treatment of the Jewish people should never be forgotten or denied, and this book helps maintain their memory. I would recommend this book for any serious student of history.
Rating:
Summary: Understanding the Holocaust
Review: Rhodes is one of my favorite writers of non-fiction. His book The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the best book I have ever read on the subject. He has also written interesting books on disease and the psychology of murder. In fact, this book seems to have grown from his study of the work of Lonnie Athens, an American criminologist, who was the subject of Rhodes' last book, Why They Kill. Here Rhodes investigates the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the teams of killers in Hitler's Germany who would begin the slaughters that would become the Holocaust. When most of us think of the Holocaust, we think of death camps like Auschwitz, the gas chambers and crematoria. What most people forget is that the earliest killings were done by groups of SS-Einsatzgruppen in the field. Literally millions of people were simply murdered through beatings, firing squads and other "basic" methods long before the construction of the first death camps. It was the effect of this "face-to-face" slaughter on the morale and morals of the men who carried it out that would lead to the more industrial, impersonal methods of the death camps in later years. Rhodes reminds of something very important in this book: yes, the Holocaust was a horrible thing but it was conducted by human beings, not monsters. The Holocaust did not just suddenly appear as a particularly horrible idea. The development of the Holocaust was a process that can be traced and, possibly, understood. And Rhodes makes an excellent stab at trying to understand what happened. In the process, he examines the psychology of people like Heinrich Himmler and many of the other people who attempted to carry out the Final Solution. Plus, he gives a fresh look at an important part of history that gets swamped in our knowledge of the Holocaust. It is well worth the read.
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