Hitler and the Holocaust (UNIVERSAL HISTORY) - Hardcover

Wistrich, Prof Robert S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297643738 ISBN 13: 9780297643739

Publisher: Orion, 2001

Synopsis

Robert Wistrich begins by exploring the origins of anti-Semitism in Europe, and especially in Germany, to try to explain how millions of Jews came to be killed systematically by the Third Reich. In the process of relating these events, he provides new and incisive answers to a number of central questions concerning the Shoah that have emerged over recent years: who, inside and outside Nazi Germany, knew that Jews were being murdered; how responsibility for the genocide should be divided between Hitler himself and ordinary Germans; and how historians have tried to make sense of the Holocaust. The book concludes by considering the legacy of Nazi crimes since 1945: the Nuremburg trials, the impact of the Holocaust on Diaspora Jewry (particularly in Israel and America), and the rise of neo-Nazism and Holocaust-denial.

Wistrich¿s book provides an exemplary account of the horrors that took place Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and is a powerful and original contribution to the literature of those terrible events.

About this title

Review:

Robert Wistrich is a highly distinguished scholar of Jewish history - the author of books on Dreyfus and on the history of anti-Semitism, among other subjects. In The Holocaust he has written a lucid, relatively short account of the Nazis' attempt to exterminate Europe's Jews. At the same time he has managed to tellingly factor in the currents of other anti-Semitisms which made the Nazis' sinister project possible - and focuses tellingly, too, on the actual collaborations which enabled it to take place. Though arguing for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, one of the book's virtues is that it is open at both ends - aware both of its origins and of how subsequent genocides remain a potential in human history. It reads like the product of a lifetime spent digesting the evidence and thinking about the significance of its subject. It's both an ideal single volume 'summary' and an original addition to its field.

Book Description:

A superb short historical analysis of the Holocaust, by one of the world¿s leading authorities on the subject.

About this edition

• Publisher: Orion
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0297643738
• ISBN 13: 9780297643739
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336