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

Rating:
Summary: He forget s to mention the other killers!
Review: There's no denying that the Final Solution did take place, but why the fixation on the sufferings of the Jews and the Germans as perpetrators?

How about researches on the atrocities and massacres, well documented in period photos and reports, performed willingly by the Slavs (Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Russians), Hungarians, the Latins (Italians, French, Greeks), the lesser Aryans (Dutch, Belgains) against the Jews?

.What about the ones they inflicted on Palestinians? Or the ones Stalin and Mao visited on their own fellow countrymen, on a much bigger scale? Or the ones the French infliccted on the Algerians?Where are the cries of indignation?

Rating:
Summary: To leave no Doubts
Review: This is a very well written book about the Horrors that the German Especial Action Squads committed. The author goes on a very linear path to show you month by month after Operation barbarossa started about how these action groups operated. That keeps you from getting lost. He shows you great maps of the areas. Tells you about Himmler, the man responsible for ordering these horrid acts. Finally, he makes you stop every once in a while, to think about the poor, poor people who went through this. They are dead of course, more than one million of them.

The Holocaust is viewed by many as just the Extermination camps, the gas that was used to kill the victims and the huge ovens. Well, before all that could be started, Himmler and the German State authorized a less "humane" way as they put it, to get rid of it's main enemies, the Jews. The author describes the main cites were these massacres took place, moslty in Russia. At times you feel like you are right there, with the victims, in line with them, getting ready to meet the end. That's when you have to stop and hope nothing like this happens again. But then you see that it has, in Yugoslavia, and other places in Africa. We can never learn because hate blinds everything, even your heart.

For many the end came when it shouldn't have. Germany had to be stopped and defeated so that these people would cease doing these horrible things. A quote from the book came from Himmler himself who said "in this Iron age, we have to sweep with Iron brooms" He was a man who ordered many to be killed but who could never do it himself. Read this book and understand why their can be no doubt, Germany had to be stopped.

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: 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!!!