Rating: 
Summary: Do NOT buy this book
Review: Well, here we go again....... another fabulous story..... another author jumping on the Holocaust bandwagon to sell another poorly written PC HistoryChannelesque documentary of horror and hardship suffered at the hands of mindless beasts from hell. Its not the stories that annoy me because these things truly happened to one degree or another, but rather it is the lack of detachment the author displays as he reveals to us the arrogant, bigotted, small minded thinking and actions of those evil Germans at it again, no doubt to make the poor jews pay for throwing Germany into the depression of the 1920s. This book is written as if the author himself had been a fly on the wall yet omnipotent to the point of knowing each and every evil thought coursing through each and every perpetrators mind.
Books like this are for stupid and ignorant people. Furthermore, some reviewers have said that it doesn't simply tell of the war on the Jews, but also tells of other victims of the genocide.... well, I call that throwing the dog a bone because from what he has written you'd hardly think that more non-Jews than Jews were killed in the Holocaust. People such as the author who write crap like this which testifies to the uniqueness of the "Jewish Holocaust", in my humble opinion, are nothing more than gold diggers who are more than happy to piss on the graves of all the other nearly 50 million victims of genocide in the 20th century, real ethnicities rather than religions that buried 1, 2, and 3 times as many of their people as did the Jews of eastern Europe. In recent years did any of us cry for the Bosnians, Rowandans, Chechnyans or Sudanese? Hell no! And the way I see it, if they aren't important enough for us to care then neither are the Jews. Again the facts are ignored, that forced multiculturalism and mass immigration from dissimilar cultures can so easily turn into a blinding hatred that brings the world and even the greatest civilizations on earth to their knees.
In addition, I've read pulp fiction that was more masterfully written than this. Do NOT buy this book, but if you do I hope you love it!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Horrifying
Review: This is an exceedingly difficult book to read due to the graphic nature of the descriptions of mass killings on the eastern front during the early years of WWII. Most of the book is just recounting individual episodes of mass shootings of Jewish victims before the Russians were able to push the German army back. There are some interesting sections where Rhodes begins to try to bring some insights to the psychological effect these shootings had on the perpetrators. Rightly, Rhodes does not spend too much time on this side of it. However, as I read this book I didn't feel as though Rhodes was going anywhere with the book as a whole. There aren't any larger points to be made, it is basically just historical narrative about a horrific and evil time in history. As such, it is a valuable book. Certainly Rhodes tries to use the killings on the eastern front as the precursor to the killing soon to come in Western Europe, as the episodes described pre-date most of the concentration camps. So, a valuable history, but rather disjointed and none too well organized.
Rating:
Summary: Error impeaches author's credibility
Review: I bought this book on an occasion when my choices were to wait or to wait while reading and no other available book exceeded that rather low standard of appealing to me more than this one. I was therefore surprised to discover that this is a quite good book. There is enough gore to satiate the most fiendish of ghouls while providing analysis sufficient to challenge the intellect. But I come not to praise this book, but to criticize it. In a prior review, Mythbuster notes the error of stating that it was the US that declared war on Germany rather than the reality that Germany declared war on the US. When I read Mythbuster's review, I believed he was excessively nitpicking regarding a collateral issue but I was wrong. The author argues that it was the US's decision to declare war on Germany that fulfilled in Hitler's mind the precondition of the Holocaust that the Jews plunge the world into another world war and thus decided Hitler to exterminate not only the Eastern Jews but also the Jews of Western Europe. Although the author does not so argue, this error allows the argument that it was the United States rather than the Nazis who caused the Holocaust. While such an argument may be clearly facetious to the objective reader, the Holocaust deniers are well known to misquote or quote out of context Holocaust experts in their quest to absolve the Nazis of guilt. The author has thus added an arrow to the quiver of the pseudo-historians. Further this error on such a basic point causes one to question the veracity of details provided elsewhere in the book. Part of the strength of this book is the insight into the details of the lives and crimes of perpetrators and victims, but can we believe them? For example, Himmler is presented as being so traumatized by Hitler's order to exterminate the Eastern Jews in the spring of 1941 that he was forced to his bed by stomach cramps but can we rely on both the author's statements of fact and then his interpretation of those facts? As prior reviewer Barron Laycock notes, this book assumes rather than argues the functionalist rather than the intentionalist view of the Holocaust. That view will certainly anger some. (See Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners for a good argument of the intentionalist school.) The purpose of this book, however, is not to argue either the functionalist view or the intentionalist view, nor even to provide a history of the Holocaust. A major theme, if not the major theme, is the socialization of violence. Some of the theory is so obvious that one wonders why it must be stated but other aspects of the theory seem more grounded in speculation than in evidence, still more so once one gets to the error I have discussed in some detail above and which impeaches the credibility of the author enormously. Overall, this is a very interesting book and but for that one error, I would have given it five stars.
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