I read every word of this exquisitely painful book, a testament without parallel. What a work of history, of documentation, of witness. To present this overwhelming human tragedy, in such detail--I do not really have words to describe how it has affected me, nor how grateful I am for it. Please, everyone, read it. ( )

This is not a book you will enjoy reading, but its a must-read nevertheless. This is a relentless pounding with figures, page after page of number, each number representing a human life lost in the worst crime of the 20th century if not all history. Individual names appear and then disappear, the fate of every Jew from even the most obscure villages all over Europe recounted in calm emotionleess tones. This is not a book screaming with anger or seeking revenge, it is a book for proving, with slow relentless logic, that this unspeakable crime actually happened. As I said this is not a book you will enjoy, it will make you squirm, it will make you weep, it will make you boil with rage, but you will remember. That's its purpose and it achieves it admirably ( )

This is a tour-de-force of history. Martin Gilbert had an ambitious project -- cover the whole Holocaust from the pre-Hitler days to after the war, all over Europe -- but he was able to accomplish his ends without either glossing over anything or making it too long. I was dizzied by the number of sources he quoted. The guy really knows how to write, too, and put his sources together into one coherent narrative.

Two caveats: Gilbert transliterates proper names strangely. For example, Tuvia Bielsky is called "Tobias Belsky." Also, the book was written over 25 years ago and is a little dated as a result; a lot of research has been done since then. I wish he'd put out a second edition. In the meantime, Martin Gilbert is my new superhero. ( )

Well written and very well documented. ( )

I find this work a good reference book when reading other books about the holocaust, because events and people appear chronologically, and the author refrains from analysis. Read as a whole, the accumulation of facts show how raw and incomprehensibly cruel it all was, and yet how true. ( )