How could this happen

"The Holocaust has long seemed incomprehensible, a monumental crime that beggars our powers of description and explanation. Historians have probed the many sources of this tragedy, but no account has united the various causes into an overarching synthesis that answers the vital question: How was such a nightmare possible in the heart of Western civilization? In How Could This Happen, historian Dan McMillan distills the vast body of Holocaust research into a cogent explanation and comprehensive analysis of the genocide's many causes, revealing how a once-progressive society like Germany could have carried out this crime. The Holocaust, he explains, was caused not by one but by a combination of factors--from Germany's failure to become a democracy until 1918, to the widespread acceptance of anti-Semitism and scientific racism, to the effects of World War I, which intensified political divisions within the country and drastically lowered the value of human life in the minds of an entire generation. Masterfully synthesizing the myriad causes that led Germany to disaster, McMillan shows why thousands of Germans carried out the genocide while millions watched, with cold indifference, as it enveloped their homeland. Persuasive and compelling, How Could This Happen explains how a perfect storm of bleak circumstances, malevolent ideas, and damaged personalities unleashed history's most terrifying atrocity"--Provided by publisher. ; Argues that the Holocaust can be accounted for by a combination of factors. One of them was Hitler himself, a successful (at least, until 1941) political and military leader, who was obsessed with a fear of "Jewish evil" and with racism. Germany's non-democratic political order, which easily led to the Nazi dictatorship, was the second factor. The decades-long use of antisemitism as a weapon against socialism and democracy caused Germans to acquiesce to the idea of "a solution for the Jewish question"; the devaluation of human life brought about by World War I and by the subsequent wars and revolutions in Europe, made them accept mass murder as a possible method for this "solution". Notes that although the Germans did not know details of the Holocaust, they knew that Jews were being killed in some way, especially since Nazi leaders publicly pronounced death threats to Jews. The antisemitism of the majority of non-Nazi Germans was milder than that in Eastern Europe, but the changing realities of the oppressive regime and of the war made them rewrite their moral code and take on an indifferent attitude toward the genocide. Argues that although the Holocaust is in many ways historically unique, there is nothing specifically German about it. The dismissal of theories of German national pathology, however, does not clear them of responsibility for the Nazi regime and the genocide. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)