The Holocaust (2017)

Laurence Rees's The Holocaust: A New History is a clear single-volume telling of the whole story, from the roots of Nazi antisemitism to the end of the war. Rees spent about 25 years meeting survivors and perpetrators for his television documentaries, and much of that testimony had never been published before, so the narrative keeps returning to the people who lived it, on both sides. It does not offer a new interpretation or wade into theoretical debates, and it does not try to; its value is that it draws decades of research together without jargon. Read it after a memoir, to put one person's story inside the whole.