The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

Overview

“This is by far the clearest book ever written about the Holocaust, and also the best at explaining its origins and grotesque mentality, as well as its chaotic development.”―Antony Beevor, bestselling author of Stalingrad

Laurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Now, he combines their never-before-seen eyewitness testimony with the latest academic research to create a uniquely accessible and authoritative account of the Holocaust.
 
In The Holocaust, Rees offers an examination of the decision-making process of the Nazi state, and in the process reveals the series of escalations that cumulatively created the horror. He argues that while hatred of the Jews was always at the epicenter of Nazi thinking, what happened cannot be fully understood without considering the murder of the Jews alongside plans to kill large numbers of non-Jews, including the disabled, Sinti, and Roma, plus millions of Soviet civilians.
 
Through a chronological, intensely readable narrative, featuring enthralling eyewitness testimony and the latest academic research, this is a compelling new account of the worst crime in history.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610398459
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	04/18/2017
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	72 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Laurence Rees is an award-winning historian and documentary filmmaker. He has authored several books including Hitler and Stalin, the bestselling, Auschwitz: A New History,  and his forthcoming title, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

List of Maps and Illustrations ix

Prologue xiii

1 Origins of Hate 1

2 Birth of the Nazis (1919-1923) 14

3 From Revolution to Ballot Box (1924-1933) 29

4 Consolidating Power (1933-1934) 54

5 The Nuremberg Laws (1934-1935) 84

6 Education and Empire-Building (1935-1938) 94

7 Radicalization (1938-1939) 118

8 The Start of Racial War (1939-1940) 151

9 Persecution in the West (1940-1941) 179

10 War of Extermination (1941) 205

11 The Road to Wannsee (1941-1942) 241

12 Search and Kill (1942) 271

13 Nazi Death Camps in Poland (1942) 295

14 Killing, and Persuading Others to Help (1942-1943) 314

15 Oppression and Revolt (1943) 334

16 Auschwitz (1943-1944) 357

17 Hungarian Catastrophe (1944) 376

18 Murder to the End (1944-1945) 403

Postscript 425

Acknowledgements 431

Notes 433

Index 493

Editorial Reviews

Contributed magnificently to the vast corpus of Holocaust literature.... Serve[s] as an excellent guide for the perplexed.”—Wall Street Journal

“Rees has compiled a readable, moving, and comprehensive overview of this scholarship, enlivened by vivid first‑person reminiscences... Readers looking for a single‑volume history of the Holocaust will have trouble finding one better than this.”—ForeignAffairs

“Rees has spent his life researching, writing, and making documentaries about the Holocaust, and his new book is full of facts and stories that landed on the cutting‑room floor when he was editing his other works. It is a long and detailed explanation of why the Holocaust happened, of why Hitler was embraced by millions, of why what's thought of by many as an aberration wasn't an aberration at all but a result of all the history and politics and religion and prejudice that went on for centuries before.”—Boston Globe

“Anyone wanting a compelling, highly readable explanation of how and why the Holocaust happened, drawing on recent scholarship and impressively incorporating moving and harrowing interviews with victims as well as chilling accounts by perpetrators, need look no further than Rees's brilliant book.”—Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, author of To Hell and Back and Hitler, A Biography

“A masterpiece... Rees' best book yet”—Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of War

“This is by far the clearest book ever written about the Holocaust, and also the best at explaining its origins and grotesque mentality, as well as its chaotic development.”—Antony Beevor, bestselling author of Stalingrad, Berlin, and The Second World War

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2017
Historian Rees (former head of BBC TV History Programmes; Auschwitz: A New History) combines thorough scholarship of the Nazi era with his own vast archive of interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders to create a comprehensive, chilling, and readable history of the Holocaust. As the Third Reich rose and conquered European countries, methods of solving the "Jewish problem" evolved. Extermination of the Jews remained a primary Nazi battlefront even as loss to the Allies was imminent. Exploring the processes and choices that resulted in mass murder, Rees convincingly shows that although Nazi ideology was based on many twisted and hateful racial theories, Jews were especially targeted for eradication. Similar to Martin Gilbert's The Holocaust, survivor testimony is compelling, especially since it is shadowed by the inability of millions of victims to speak for themselves. The Holocaust was a horrible crime against humanity that sadly continues to be denied and perpetrated in different forms around the world. VERDICT Rees's ability to weave parallel global and personal histories makes this an outstanding, necessary, and timely book that should engage all readers of high school age or above.—Laurie Unger Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL

Library Journal

★ 2017-03-15
A magnificent new history that tracks the gradual evolution of the Final Solution.In this orderly, horrifying study, former BBC creative director Rees (Hitler's Charisma: Leading Millions into the Abyss, 2013, etc.) emphasizes that the creation and implementation of gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps did not occur overnight as a solution to the "Jewish problem." Instead, the Nazi resolution to annihilate the Jewish population developed after a long process of ideological propaganda emerging from the top of the Nazi leadership—Hitler was making anti-Semitic declarations as early as 1919—and led to the trial-and-error installation of killing methods, beginning with the experimental gassing of disabled people in early 1940. Rees moves through these stages chronologically, building the "origins of hate" through the early Christian world and culminating in the "eugenics" movement of the turn of the 20th century. At the same time, the author warns against drawing "a straight line from the pre-First World War hatreds of the Jews to the Third Reich and the Holocaust." Other factors compounding the toxic mix began to convince the German public that the Jews were an "enemy" and to blame for the loss of the war, the communist uprising, and the Weimar government and misery of hyperinflation. The early chapters, which delineate the conditions in which Nazism took root among a vulnerable people (beaten down by social and economic conditions), are especially instructive and chilling. The consolidation of Nazi power moved from public humiliation of Jews to the Nuremberg Laws, while political empire-building via the Anschluss resulted in an efficient "conveyor belt" of persecution and expulsion by Heinrich Himmler's SS. The Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 inaugurated the "racial war" Hitler had prophesied, leading to more pragmatic solutions to "containing" the Jews, from ghettos to deportation to mass murder. Over the course of this increasingly grim narrative, Rees employs first-person accounts—from interviews he conducted during the past 25 years—to render palpable senses of humanity and context. A thorough, concise, evenhanded work, essential for libraries and schools.

Kirkus Reviews