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

Masters of Death is Richard Rhodes's chronological account of the Third Reich's Einsatzgruppen (a hand-picked task force) and its death work--the executions of 1.5 million people, Jews and non-Jews--in Russia and Eastern Europe from 1941 through 1943. Rhodes sees these operations (the victims were, almost exclusively, shot) as a ghastly prelude to the subsequent (and much more written-about) horrors of the death camps. In chilling--and occasionally excessive--detail, Rhodes describes the killings and the reasons behind the Reich's cautious, rather than precipitous, escalation of the same: the military's "concern for German and world opinion"; the need to improve methodology; and finally, the need to "condition" the troops, thereby avoiding "disabling trauma." Rhodes makes good use of firsthand accounts and outlines the effects the larger war (Pearl Harbor; the failure to defeat Britain) had on Hitler's attempted obliteration of European Jewry. His chapters on the nature of evil seem hurried and not particularly fresh. --H. O'Billovich

• The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders
• The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Revised and Expanded Edition: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka
• Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
• Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949
• The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them
• Energy: A Human History
• Waffen-SS: Hitler's Army at War
• Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
• Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939
• Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist