Recommended Reading

Jonathan Freedland’s “The Escape Artist” tells the story of Auschwitz’s horrors — and the multitudes who refused to listen.

It would be almost too obvious to say that this is a timely book. With the resurgence of overt antisemitism in recent years—not least the online proliferation of "cultural Marxist" as a thinly veiled alt-right slur—Paul Hanebrink's excavation of the Jews-as-communists myth arrives at a grimly appropriate time. Primarily focused on East Central Europe while also pulling in material from across the continent, the result is an engaged and sophisticated genealogy of one specific strand of antisemitic paranoia. As the book adeptly illustrates, the assumption that communism was a Jewish plot was "a core ele­ment of counterrevolutionary, antidemo­cratic, and racist ideologies in many dif­ferent countries" (p. 4). Thus, apprehending the myth of "Judeo-Bolshevism" is necessary for understanding the nature of Far-Right politics in both the past and present.

Götz Aly, a well-respect­ed and well pub­lished his­to­ri­an of the Third Reich, tries his hand at one of the most per­plex­ing and elu­sive issues of the Holo­caust: why the Ger­mans and why the Jews?

It’s tempting to draw parallels between the Hitler era and the present age of ascendant nationalism, and Gellately (History/Florida State Univ.; The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, 2018, etc.) offers reasons to do so.

WHY did a great nation like Germany elevate the scum of its own people to power, and then follow them into the abyss? Few questions in the history of the past century have been more thoroughly explored or contentiously debated. An astonishing memoir, written decades ago and only now making its appearance, freshly illuminates this gnawing enigma.

In this meticulous, vivid, and grim accounting of the deliberate murder of civilians by Nazi Germany, Kay manages to keep a balance between careful analysis of the evidence and reminders of the horrors of the events he is describing, including individuals’ harrowing recollections of surviving by hiding among dead bodies—often those of their own relatives.