I review hundreds of books a year for my radio talk show, and have written three (the latest is Think a Second Time, HarperCollins). This short readable book by an agnostic is one of the few that I consider essential. It demonstrates beyond rational doubt why America needs religion. The data and the fairness are awe-inspiring. Dennis Prage

Despite the trappings of scholarship, the book is unbalanced. It systematically ignores or downplays the evidence of the Catholic Church's opposition to Nazism. Mit Brennender Sorge, Pius XII's courageous encyclical against Nazism in 1937, is dismissed as a fluke. In fact, it was written with the full support of the German bishops and its publication triggered a bitter persecution of German Catholics. There is little here on the destruction of Catholic schools, the show trails of clergy, the destruction of the Catholic press, the persecution of the religious orders. On the other hand, every sign of Catholic sympathy for Hitler is magnified out of proportion.

The result is an anti-Catholic cartoon.

A balanced, fair, detailed and scholarly book that could be of interest to all except those who are irrevocably, rigidly and unalterably pro- or anti-Catholic.

The Christian contribution and response to the actions of Nazi Germany, in particular the Holocaust, is perhaps the most apalling event in the history of Western civilization. One reads Mr. Lewy's contribution to Holocaust scholarship with an ever growing sense of rage. One's rage is not directed at the Catholic Church in particular, because there were no corporate heroes in this tragic episode. There were individual acts of heroism, to be sure, but at best the Church (and by Church, I mean Protestant as well as Catholic)is guilty of massive self-interest and moral cowardice. This book is a case study in the behavior of one group. A sense of fairness and dry scholarship pervades this book. One will not find diatribes here; neither will one find the selective omission of facts favorable to the church mentioned by one reviewer. One will find the facts laid out by someone who has bent over backward to give the benefit of the doubt but who has also laid out the case against the Church with the skill of a brilliant and experienced prosecutor. Only occasionally do his outrage and passion shine through, and then only in summary and conclusion paragraphs. Is the author fair? He is at pains to describe the persecution of the Catholic Church by the Nazis. He leaves no doubt that throughout the Nazi period, the very existence of the Church as a moral force was endangered by Nazi arrogance, contempt, deceit, and betrayal. The Church was, indeed, a wounded church, dealing from a position of weakness, not strength. And yet. In its zeal to protect the institution, the Church abandoned, perhaps forever, any claim it may have ever had to moral legitimacy (my claim, not Lewy's). Better for the German Catholic Church to have died a martyr's death than to live as Hitler's more or less willing pawn. People are more precious in God's sight than institutions.

This book covers the fate of the European Gypsies during the Nazi occupation of Europe. It came across as a comprehensive and accurate history of this piece of the holocaust. What stuck me in the reading was that the usual German thoroughness and efficiency did not seem to take hold with their treatment of the Gypsies. Don't get me wrong, they did a good job in decimating the ranks of the Gypsies, it is just that it always seemed to be an afterthought for the Germans. The very determined and methodical way the Nazis went after the Jewish population using the legal structure and government propaganda machine was not really used against the Gypsies to the same extent as it was against the Jews.

It is interesting that what probably kept the Gypsies under the radar was the fact that they moved around so much. What is ironic is that this movement was one of the major issues the Germans had against the Gypsies, which in turn brought about the gypsies horrible treatment. The author tells us that the Gypsies in Europe had been a disliked and persecuted minority for many centuries. Overall the author details the methods the Nazis went after the Gypsies, which followed the same path as the Jews. First they started to harass them with laws which also raised the dislike of the Gypsies among the population. Then the Nazis started to gather the Gypsies into camps to control them and then sent them on to the Concentration Camps with all the horrors of medical experiments, starvation and gas chambers.

Overall the book is an interesting read and it seams to be a well-researched work. At times the writing can be a little dry, but overall it holds your attention. The average reader might not get a lot out of the book, but if you are interested in the holocaust or World War 2 then this will be a good addition to your collection.

At last there is a reliable, scholarly treatment of the Nazi persecution of Gypsies ! Lewy's work distinguishes itself from previous writings in at least two ways:

First, he has a good command of the sources, which he uses conscientiously and authoritatively. He is thus able to paint for us the murderous Nazi policies in regard to Gypsies, and the unspeakable suffering of the Gypsy people under Nazi rule.

Second, and again on the basis of these sources, Lewy can tell us what the Nazi's Gypsy persecution was and what is was not. It was a crime of great magnitude, and probably amounted to the outright murder of more than half of all the Gypsies in Nazi-controlled areas. It was not a "Holocaust" in the sense of the Nazi killings of the Jews. The Holocaust sought to kill all Jews without distinction while the murder of Gypsies involved a Nazi policy of killing some and sparing others.

There were of course still others who suffered greatly under the Nazis. There were Communists and Socialists, and Jehovah's Witnesses, among many other such groups. Whole nations were targeted, for instance the Poles. Lewy cannot deal with all such Nazi crimes, but he should have at least reminded us of them in order to provide perspective and comparison. This is a fault of the book.

A second fault lies in Lewy's apparent ignorance of the ethnographic and linguistic literature concerning the Gypsy people. Some such acquaintance would have prevented some rather naïve observations. And it would also have made him more knowledgeable in his references to the many self-styled spokesmen for the Gypsies.

Such faults, however, are heavily outweighed by the very substantial virtues. This book is an absolutely indispensable contribution to our knowledge of the Nazi dictatorship.

This is an absorbing, well-written and quite readable text book by a noted 20th century historian, Guenter Lewy, and it constitutes a disturbing, graphic and poignant overview of the Nazi campaign against the gypsy population of central Europe. The German national socialist regime, always in search for helpless, infirm and unwell sectors of the population to scapegoat and persecute, found in the gypsies an ideal target by way of a collection of powerless, rootless, and socio-politically unsavory groups of individuals to prey upon. Yet this persecution has not been widely publized or recognized until now largely because of the nature of the gypsy population, i.e. due to their own lack of social and political visibility, no one has paid a lot of attention to their plight or to the multitude of ways in which they were persecuted, along with Jews and other political groups by the Nazis.

This book remedies that egregious oversight, painting a vivid, quite compassionate picture of the gypsies' dilemma, and at the same time marshaling a damning indictment of the general campaign of mistreatment, disenfranchisement, torture, and murder conducted by the Third Reich against all subjugated peoples both in greater Germany and also in the countries conquered as they pushed both east and west during the prosecution of the war. According to the author, the policy seemed to evolve as the Nazis encountered such groups in their conquests, and whatever policies as emerged did so more in relation to the local officials' negative views of the gypsies as being thieves, trouble-makers and undesirables than due to any overall pre-planned approach.

Of course, this sort of insight shouldn't come as a total surprise to students of Third Reich social policies. Even Himmler's well-documented plan for the "Final Solution" is now considered by a number of noted historians to owe more to the requirements of exigent circumstance that evolved as the Wehrmacht rolled through Poland during Operation Barbarossa than from any long-term plan to systematically exterminate all European Jews. The Nazis realized they could not feed or shelter the Jews and maintain their schedule for populating the hinterlands, and the extermination program was conceived of as a way out of that dilemma.

It should also be noted that the Nazi bureaucracy was rife with duplications and redundancies, and that this led to disorganization and confusion. As a result, it was exceedingly ineffective and inefficient. The history associated with the conduct of the army and its special branches toward extermination also reflects this disorganization and amateurish, rigid and unfocused leadership and direction. In spite of this lack of leadership or any clear and unambiguous policy, the local officials often improvised, with gruesome effect. As history shows, they were a deadly, murderous crew.

The campaign as described in this well-documented and painstakingly researched book reflects that lack of coherent policy and disorganization in the actions taken against the gypsies. However, this lack of specific focus does not mean they were not massively and negatively affected by government policies. On the contrary, from the inception of programs against the gypsies began in 1938 to the bitter end, they suffered the fates of so many others; deportation to concentration camps, exclusion from school, work and social life, slave labor, involuntary sterilization, torture, medical experimentation, and extermination. This book fully documents the place of the gypsies as a class of victims in the Holocaust, and fills a void too long left vacant by scholarship and public recognition. This is an excellent book, carefully researched, well documented, and compassionate in its comprehensive consideration of the plight of European gypsies at the hands of the Third Reich.