The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders

Good old days is an historical account of wittnesses inside the einsatzgruppen murders of jews.
it was not hard to understand that most of the men doing the shooting got sick to the point of having to get drunk to forget.
what i DID find shocking was that many of these wittnesses told that if they refused to shoot jews, they were assigned to another job...it was not 'following orders', or the fact that they either did this job or they were punished severly.... not true. simply, they all could have, had they chosen to, not do the job of shooting jews by massacaring them as they dug their own graves.....
the soldiers tell their stories, in their own words...
a riviting account of the 'good old days''
i recommend this book to anyone studying nazi history, and those who want the truth instead of propaganda.

This book, an account of the barbarity committed by Germans, and others, should be required reading for all German schoolkids and grown-ups who question whether the Holocaust ever happened. While the Jews seldom mention the more than 20 million other human beings that were ordered killed by Hitler and Stalin that does not mean that they were not also slaughtered. I am not a Jew, but I am a student of History and I can not understand how human beings can do this to their fellow-man. This book contains first hand accounts of the atrocities committed by Germans, Ukranians, Latvians.Estonians, and Lithuanians against their Jewish neighbors. How many Albert Einsteins and Jonas Salks may have been eliminated? This book is a chilling account of human beings exibiting their very worst behavior.

this book is disturbing to read,actually the murders commited by the lithuanian criminals made me cringe,as it reminds one that these things are still going on in the world,such as the atrocities commited by the serbians in the balkans,these men are worse than animals,men of the einsatzgruppen and the sonderkommand were not of the same cloth and caliber as soldiers of the panzergruppe or the luftwaffe,very few were awarded merit,most were weak minded criminals given power to do as they please,one can only hope they have no afterlife, they deserve to never live again.

This book documents the activities of the Einsatzgruppen or "Task Forces" which the Third Reich used to murder millions of helpless children,women and men primarily by firing squad. They murdered more than 38,000 people in 1 day alone at Babi Yar and started murdering with gas only because this method was too inefficient for all the millions the Nazis wanted to murder.

As others have commented on reviews of other Einsatzgruppen books - this is very,very,very disturbing and difficult reading even for anyone since it describes a depth of inhumanity most refuse to believe is possible.

Among the horrors this book describes "Mass Murder Tourism" where Wehrmacht officers travel around the Eastern front to watch murder squads conducting "Special Operations". Of course these special operations were always conducted against unarmed helpless children,women and men.

Outside of General Johannes Albrecht Blaskowitz, Fmr. Commander of 1,8 & 9 Armies and Frmr Commander of Army Groups G&H. Precious few resigned or protested to OKW about what was going on.

Oh yes and Von Stauffenberg and company only considered action when the war was being lost otherwise they seem like they would have been very happy with Fortress Europa and the new Lebensraum in the east.
There were other plots against the Fuhrer before that but none came to fruition.

I only came across this book yesterday and purchased it at a discounted price at a chain bookstore. I read it in practically one day - it was a compelling read, though a really painful and harrowing experience. This book is basically a compilation of diary entries, letters, and confidential reports meticulously detailing the acts of persecution carried out against the Jewish populace of Nazi-occupied Europe. The accounts are mostly matter-of-fact, written by German soldiers, SS officers, and also observers [photographers, German army medics etc] that describe the horrible atrocities committed upon European Jewry during the Holocaust. And throughout the book, there are numerous photographs that capture these bestial acts, showing victims being herded to their deaths, beaten, shot,etc.

What really struck me was that some of the violence against the Jews was not committed by the German soldiers, but by local Gentiles who had lived with the Jews until the Germans came. Case in point is the massacre of the Kovno Jews by a Lithuanian mob - these innocent civilians were set upon by Lithuanian thugs using crowbars and clubbed to death. As one observer noted, there were Lithuanian Gentile women who would hold up their children to witness the massacre, whilst clapping and cheering the mob on. Truly horrific and hard to imagine, though it does attest to the prevalent anti-Semitism in many parts of Europe.

Truly chilling is the realisation that many of the German guards and soldiers were unrepentant about the atrocities they participated in /witnessed against the Jews - it was all in the line of duty and they were more preoccupied with getting good food, obtaining leave etc.

This is a terrible book in its gruesome detailing of the murder of European Jewry, but an essential read nonetheless for it portrays the evils of the Nazi regime and also anti-Semitism, and how easy it was to cross the line from morality to barbarity.