The war against the Jews, 1933-1945

Part I, "The Final Solution", describes the Holocaust as a Nazi German undertaking aiming to "solve the Jewish question" by systematic mass murder of the Jews. Dwells on the personality of Hitler and on the formation of his antisemitic worldview; argues that Hitler contemplated a mass annihilation of Jews already in the early 1920s, when he joined the Nazi Party and when he became its leader. Surveys the transformation of antisemitic ideology in Germany in the 19th-early 20th centuries. Describes the evolution of the Nazi anti-Jewish policies - from the anti-Jewish legislation to the death camps. Part II, "The Holocaust", portrays it from the viewpoint of its victims, the Jews. Dwells on the reactions of German Jews to the escalation of anti-Jewish policies in the Reich in 1933-38. Describes the ghetto system in wartime Poland and Lithuania, dwells on the functioning of the Nazi-installed Jewish councils ("the official community"), of the traditional Jewish self-organization in the ghettos ("the alternative community"), and on the Jewish anti-Nazi underground ("the countercommunity"). Discusses the reactions of all these communities to the deportations of Jews from the ghettos to the killing centers. Deals with the Jewish resistance - uprisings in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, Białystok, and some smaller ghettos. Appendix A presents data on the Holocaust from country to country. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)