The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust, Third Edition

Rating:
Summary: Very thorough facts and figures
Review: This detailed account of horrendous facts will bring tears to the eyes of the hardest ones.
Each of the numbers reported concerns human persons with their wives, family, parents, children. Behind each figure there is a drama. It is not a book about the holocaust, it's just figures and maps. There is no human aspect in these inhuman statistics.
Ever since the Greek classic period, the ones reporting a defeat are no longer killed. Martin Gilbert is supplying a very detailed, thorough and actualized report on one of the greatest defeat of humanity. He should be praised for that.
His book doesn't cover the documents which permitted the holocaust or the proofs substantiating what is not to be proven. It simply attempts at tracing each and every deportation by the nazi (no capital N, please, they have lost such a right). This is an essential working tool for historians, if they can avoid loosing the human faces behind the figures.
I still rather work with Raul Hilberg, Richard Breitman, Walter Laqueur, Randolph Braham, Yitshak Arad, Gerald Reitlinger, Lucy Dawidowicz, Saul Friedlander, Yeshuda Bauer, John Mendelsohn, Henry Friedlander & Sybil Milton, and many other with the same approach but Martin Gilbert book is always next to each of them, it maintains a synthetic global view and it is a reference as well.
If you have an interest in the nazi mass murders, you simply cannot afford not to have Gilbert's atlas. By the way why don't we have a similar Atlas on the goulag as yet? This lack shows how Gilbert's book filled a hisorical need.
Don't be satisfied with Martin Gilbert's Atlas, but don't do without it.
People dying in the camps were begging for us to tell: Jewish or not Jewish, let's keep on telling.