The Best Books About the Holocaust

Anne Frank · 1947 · 283 pages

The most widely read document of the Holocaust. Essential reading that transcends the category of war book.

Primo Levi · 1947 · 188 pages

Levi writes with the analytical precision of a chemist. His chapter 'The Drowned and the Saved' is one of the most important.

Elie Wiesel · 1960 · 120 pages

At just 120 pages, Night is the most concentrated expression of the Holocaust's horror. Wiesel's loss of faith and the death of.

Art Spiegelman · 1991 · 296 pages

The first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. Spiegelman invented a new way to tell the story of the Holocaust — through the.

Christopher Browning · 1992 · 271 pages

The most disturbing book on this list, because its answer to how ordinary people commit genocide is: easily. Required reading in Holocaust studies for thirty years.

Primo Levi · 1986 · 203 pages

His most profound work, completed months before his death. The chapter on the grey zone is the most important piece of moral analysis to come out of the Holocaust.

Viktor Frankl · 1946 · 184 pages

Part memoir, part psychological theory. Frankl's argument that humans can endure anything if they find purpose has sold over 16.

Ian Kershaw · 2008 · 1072 pages

Kershaw's concept of 'working towards the Führer' remains the most convincing explanation of how the regime functioned. The standard against which every Hitler book is measured.

Gitta Sereny · 1974 · 380 pages

The deepest interrogation of a perpetrator ever conducted. Sereny walks Stangl to the admission he had spent thirty years avoiding.

Władysław Szpilman · 1946 · 222 pages

Adapted into Roman Polanski's film. Szpilman's account is remarkable for its restraint — he records horror without.

Timothy Snyder · 2010 · 524 pages

Snyder reframes the Holocaust and Soviet terror as a single geographic catastrophe. One of the most influential and debated history books of the century.

Corrie ten Boom · 1971 · 241 pages

The rescuer's perspective on the Holocaust — and a testament of faith under persecution that has never been out of print.

Herman Wouk · 1978 · 1042 pages

Wouk called it the main task of his life: the whole war in one novel, with the Holocaust at its moral center. The Midway chapters alone are worth the thousand pages.

Richard J. Evans · 2008 · 926 pages

The definitive scholarly account of how Germans experienced, supported, and suffered the war their regime started.

Edith Eger · 2017 · 320 pages

The natural successor to Frankl, whom Eger knew. Memoir and therapy in one: what the camps taught her about the prisons people build afterwards.

Nikolaus Wachsmann · 2015 · 865 pages

Twenty years of research into the definitive single-volume account — the system entire, perpetrators and prisoners together.

Jack Fairweather · 2019 · 505 pages

The most astonishing untold story of the war, suppressed for decades because Pilecki was later executed by Poland's communists. Costa Book of the Year.

Thomas Keneally · 1982 · 400 pages

Booker Prize winner built entirely from survivor testimony. The rare book that asks why a bad man did a great thing — and refuses to fully answer.

Markus Zusak · 2005 · 552 pages

Sixteen million copies sold. The German home front through a child's eyes — and the most common entry point to WWII reading for an entire generation.

Hannah Arendt · 1963 · 312 pages

Sixty years of argument have not exhausted it. The phrase everyone quotes comes from a book almost nobody who quotes it has read — fix that.

Lois Lowry · 1989 · 137 pages

The Newbery-winning introduction to the Holocaust for generations of children — built on the true story of Denmark saving almost its entire Jewish population.

Laurent Binet · 2010 · 327 pages

Operation Anthropoid told as a thriller that interrogates its own right to exist. Prix Goncourt du premier roman, and unlike anything else on this list.

Judith Kerr · 1971 · 191 pages

Kerr's own childhood flight, gently told — the refugee experience for young readers, from the author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

Kate Quinn · 2019 · 560 pages

Quinn weaves the all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment — the real Night Witches — into the hunt for the war's escaped murderers.

William Styron · 1979 · 562 pages

The choice of the title entered the language. A National Book Award winner about what survival costs — and a controversial one, as a Gentile Polish heroine at Auschwitz.

Leon Uris · 1961 · 539 pages

The fighting Jews of Warsaw given the epic treatment — forty days of revolt against the SS with almost no weapons. Uris at his page-turning best.

Georgia Hunter · 2017 · 416 pages

A statistical miracle turned novel: the odds of an entire family surviving were close to zero. Now a major series.

Bernhard Schlink · 1995 · 218 pages

The defining novel of German generational guilt — how the children of the perpetrators live with love for them.

Albert Speer · 1969 · 596 pages

The most intimate portrait of Hitler ever written by an insider — and a masterclass in self-exculpation. Read it alongside the scholarship that dismantled Speer's claims of ignorance.

Antonio Iturbe · 2017 · 423 pages

Based on the real Dita Kraus, who survived and verified the book. Reading as resistance, in the one place books were a capital crime.