Die Jahre der Vernichtung

Chronicles the phases of the Holocaust in all the countries of Europe, as perceived by Nazis, their victims, and the onlookers, and in present-day scholarship. Attributes the Final Solution to Hitler's rabid hatred of the Jews, whom he charged with inciting the Second World War; he believed that, for the salvation of Europe and of the world, they must be eliminated. From his monomaniacal harangues, the German people could not but understand that this extermination was actually taking place. Although many thought this measure excessive, few - even in the resistance or the Churches - opposed it, because of their own antisemitism, heightened by Nazi propaganda. The same or worse antisemitism existed in the occupied and in the satellite countries, causing them to collaborate in the extermination of their Jews, and in the Allied and neutral countries, which rejected proposals for rescue. The system succeeded not because of mere technical efficiency but because of the fanatic conviction of the perpetrators in the rightness and necessity of their actions. Describes reactions of Jews in the ghettos, the Jewish councils and the Jewish resistance, and the weak response of Jews in the rest of the world. Discusses various historiographical controversies. Quotes extensively from published documents, including the speeches of Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler, Goebbels' diaries, SD reports, bureaucratic correspondence, military reports, soldiers' letters home, diaries of German anti-Nazis, ghetto chronicles, and memoirs and diaries of victims, tracing the fate of many diarists through the phases of the Holocaust until their death or (for a very few) their liberation. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)