Recommended Reading

A novel about fourteen-year-old Gyorgy Koves' experience being deported from his home in Budapest to Auschwitz.

A novel about "the commissioner's" trip to a nondescript town in a middle-European country, which turns into an ominous journey.

Translated by Martin Chalmers. Life during the Holocaust is illustrated in the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a German Jew whose life was spared because of his marriage to an "Aryan." His diary documents the gradual loss of his rights, his friends, his possessions, and ultimately his dignity as a Jew in Nazi Germany. Through personal and detailed accounts of daily life, the banalities of the Third Reich are revealed.

Translated by Martin Chalmers. This symphony of voices is ordered by the brilliant, grumbling Klemperer, struggling to complete his work on eighteenth-century France while documenting the ever-tightening Nazi grip. He loses first his professorship and then his car, his phone, his house, even his typewriter, and is forced to move into a Jews' House (the last step before the camps), put his cat to death (Jews may not own pets), and suffer countless other indignities.

Koonz traces how the Nazis developed a rationale for their genocidal policies against the Jews and how they used a range of media to convince the German people of the necessity and indeed, the morality, of those policies.

This work explores how the Nazis used the concepts of community and belonging as a means to promote conformity and solidarity, resulting in mass crime and genocide.