The extermination of the European Jews has been one of the events most studied by contemporary historiography. We offer a selection of the essays and novels that have best portrayed the horror of the Holocaust, through which it is possible to understand the keys to genocide.

Translation by Cristina Piña. Akal. 1,456 pages. 80 euros. You can buy it here.

A Viennese Jew who became a naturalized American after fleeing with his family after the Anschluss, in this seminal essay Raul Hilberg carries out a comprehensive and rigorous reconstruction of the motley set of policies, initiatives and behaviors that made possible the destruction of a considerable part of the European population by appealing to his unassimilable ethnic, religious and cultural character, or their impossible integration into the national racial community. The extermination process, Hilberg explains, was carried out “step by step” and the measures “were introduced in the following order: first, the concept of Jew was defined; then expropriation operations were inaugurated; third, , the Jews were concentrated in ghettos; finally, the decision was made to annihilate the European Jews”.

Translated by Cecilia Belza and David Leon. Criticism. 1,136 pages. 31.90 eruos. You can buy it here.

Historian from the University of London, he maps the vast geography of Nazi terror, made up of hundreds of fields in which the functions of political and ideological repression (concentration), with those of labor exploitation (work) and finally with those of extermination are combined. (death), depending on its classification within the bureaucratic framework of the German State. Wachsmann constructs an unprecedented, comprehensive, and balanced chronicle of the mapping of these places of horror from their inception in 1933 to their extinction in the spring of 1945. Comprehensive and based on a multitude of archival documents and cutting-edge academic research, the historian brings to light surprising revelations about the operation and scope of this system of industrial death and the changes that its evolution brought about in the political, legal, social, economic and military spheres of the Nazi regime.

Translation by Juan Mari Madariaga. Criticism. 488 pages. 23.95 euros. You can buy it here.

In this essay the German historian details the economic reasons behind a decision that was not just racial or ideological. And he affirms that “the Holocaust cannot be understood until it is analyzed as the most consequent homicidal robbery in modern history.”

Translation by Luis Noriega and David León. Criticism. 464 pages. 21.90 euro. You can buy it here.

Based on hundreds of interviews with protagonists, the researcher and collaborator of the BBC (for which he made an audiovisual version of his work) builds a chilling testimony that, related by his protagonists, aims to awaken our consciences.

Foreword by Gabriel Albiac. confluences. 312 pages. 19 euro. You can buy it here.

This rigorous essay, between philosophy and history, seeks to point out the spatiotemporal coordinates and the unique political nature of the Holocaust that, above all, the authors explain, was a matter of State. Because in order to prevent the Holocaust from becoming anything or nothing, that is, in order not to trivialize it, it must be strictly defined.

Translation by M. Batista and E. Hojman. Edhasa. 536 pages. 25 euros. You can buy it here.

How was it possible for a unit made up of ordinary middle-class Germans to turn into a group of ruthless killers? In this essential classic, Browning recounts how some of those battalions were trained to be able to shoot children, women and men at point blank range, a procedure by which 25% of all Holocaust victims were annihilated.

Translation by Miguel Izquierdo. Edhasa. 576 pages. 29.50 euros. You can buy it here.

Franz Stangl, commander of the Sobibor and Treblinka camps, was accused of killing 700,000 people, something he never regretted, as this book of interviews shows, in which he talks starkly with the Italian journalist.

Prologue by Cousin Levi. Translation by John Stephen Fassio. Arzalia. 312 pages. 20.95 euros. You can buy it here.

Prefaced by Primo Levi in ​​a sort of poetic justice, this book collects the testimony of the commander of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a mass murderer whose victims number in the millions and whose conscience never existed. In this text, written in his captivity shortly before he was hanged in the camp itself, he tells how he managed to make Auschwitz the most efficient extermination camp of all those installed in occupied Poland.

Translation by Pilar Gómez Bedate. Peninsula. 656 pages. 23.95 euro. Ebook: 7.99 euros. You can buy it here.

Trilogy composed by If this is a man, The truce and The sunken and the saved, it is one of the essential classics on the subject. In them, the Turin writer, who committed suicide in 1987, offers one of the best detailed frescoes on his experience as a slave worker in the buna (synthetic rubber) factory installed in Monwitz (Auschwitz III).

Translation by José Miguel Parra, Introduction by Fernando Palmero and Prologue by Yehuda Bauer. Confluences, 332 pages. 24 euros. You can buy it here.

In Auschwitz, as in the rest of the camps, it was the Jews themselves, organized in Sondekommandos, as this Slovak survivor explains (whose testimony was also collected by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah) who were in charge of completing the process: beating the victims out of the cattle cars in which they had been transported for days; lure them into the gas chambers, camouflaged as collective showers; remove their hieratic bodies from the chambers; finally burn their bodies.

Foreword by Simone Weil. Translation by Manuel Serrat Crespo. RBA. 224 pages. 19 euro. You can buy it here.

The Italian survivor recounts, without sparing any details, the maddening experience of someone forced to work with death in gas chambers and crematoria to try to stay alive. There were not many who managed to end up alive, since the members of the Sonderkommando were relieved from time to time.

Translation by Judith Xantus. Cliff. 264 pages. 15 euro. You can buy it here.

With a mask on, the Hungarian writer dives into his memories and objectively relates the hurtful reality of the extermination camps characterized by the most inhuman daily life. Kertész is one of the authors who has written the most and with the greatest rigor about his experience in the field. About this book, Lajos Koltai made one of the essential films to understand what life was like in the Nazi camps.

Translation by Javier Albiñana. tusquets. 144 pages. 17 euro. You can buy it here.

This Goncourt-winning novel fictionalizes with terrifying precision how the big businessmen who financed Hitler’s rise to power and did big business with the SS (Opel, Krupp, Siemens, IG Farben, Bayer, Telefunken, Agfa, Varta… ) retained their privileges after the war.

Translation by Fina Warschaver. Southern. 352 pages. 9.99 euro. You can buy it here.

A teenager in the Nazi extermination camps (The Night), the subsequent period of reflection in Palestine (The Dawn) and the love story in New York, aware that the wound will not heal (The Day).

Translation by Juan Antonio Mendez. Cliff. 296 pages. 20 euros. You can buy it here.

A contemporary classic, in this beautiful novel, set in Ferrara, Bassani condensed the cruel fate of the Jews of Italy when the Mussolini regime followed in the footsteps of the German anti-Semitic frenzy.

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