This epic book completes the richest and fullest study yet made of the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. Based on a vast scholarly literature, it also incorporates original research and personal letters, diaries, etc. Acclaim for Volume 1: "This will be the standard work for many years to come" (Daniel Johnson, The Times) "There have been many books about Nazism's persecution of the Jews, but none as magisterial or comprehensive as this" (Richard Evans, Sunday Telegraph) "The merits of this work are many; it is easily the best book of a distinguished historian. It is based on a great variety of sources, published and unpublished, and the judgement of the author cannot be faulted on any major issue...This is a very good, very important book. It needed to be written before the last historians disappear who, because of the date and place of their birth and their personal experience, know certain things in their bones about the period of the Holocaust." (Walter Lacquer, Los Angeles Times) "Saul Friedlander is the most astute, sophisticated and stylish historian of the Holocaust working in any language today." (Michael Burleigh)

In 1936, against a backdrop of swastikas flying and storm troopers looming, an African-American son of sharecroppers set three world records and won an unprecedented four gold medals, single-handedly crushing Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy. The story of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympic Games is that of a high-profile athlete giving a performance that transcends sports--but it is also the intimate and complex tale of the courage of one remarkable man. From the start, American participation in the games was controversial--a boycott attempt was thwarted by the president of the American Olympic Committee. Owens was befriended by a German rival, who helped Owens win the gold medal at his own expense; two Jewish sprinters were, at the last moment, denied the chance to compete for the United States out of misguided politeness to the Nazi hosts; and a myth was born that Hitler himself had snubbed Owens.--From publisher description

A history of the T4 program, or "euthanasia program", in Nazi Germany - that is, the murder of handicapped persons by the Nazis. This program was preceded by the politicization of science, which incorporated popular prejudices into "scientific" theories and declared some individuals and even "racial" groups, like Jews and Gypsies, to be "valueless"; by the eugenic movement; and by the misuse of scientific hypotheses by politicians. The policy of exclusion of the "racially inferior" stood at the center of the Nazi utopia. The "euthanasia program", implemented in 1939-40, paved the way for the mass extermination of Jews and Gypsies in 1942-44. Many of those involved in the T4 program (e.g. Franz Stangl) were later involved in the operation of the death camps. Special attention is devoted to the murder of handicapped Jews. These, progressively excluded from the public welfare system and from the medical institutions, were concentrated in 1939-40 in special Jewish hospitals and later killed in the course of the "euthanasia program".

The man the New York Times has called "the preeminent scholar of the Holocaust" tells the stories of those who caused, experienced, and witnessed the great human catastrophe.

'An ambitious and engrossing investigation of the moral legacies which stubbornly refuse to pass' Brendan Simms As the western world struggles with its legacies of racism and colonialism, what can we learn from the past in order to move forward? Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman, who grew up as a white girl in the American South during the civil rights movement, is a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. In clear and gripping prose, she uses this unique perspective to combine philosophical reflection, personal history and conversations with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through focusing on the particularities of those histories, she provides examples for other nations, whether they are facing resurgent nationalism, ongoing debates over reparations or controversies surrounding historical monuments and the contested memories they evoke. It is necessary reading for all those confronting their own troubled pasts.

A collection of essays written between 1985-92. Contents:

For many, the name of Adolf Eichmann is synonymous with the Nazi murder of six million Jews. As a perpetuator of the Final Solution he stands alongside Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler as one of history's most notorious murderers, yet ever since Hannah Arendt's seminal book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil", there has been disagreement about the essence of Eichmann and by extension, about the definition of evil action. Was he a human monster or a petty bureaucrat? To what degree did the totalitarian organization to which he belonged absolve him and his staff from individual choice and responsibility for atrocities? This title looks at the words and actions of Eichmann and the bureaucrats he worked with in Berlin and throughout the more significant Gestapo offices in Western Europe. It claims that Hannah Arendt's thesis about the banality of evil was wrong. In chilling detail, it presents a group of people completely aware of what they were doing, people with high ideological motivation, people of initiative and dexterity who contributed far beyond what was necessary. While most of these bureaucrats sat behind desks rather than behind machine guns, there was nothing banal about the role they played in the destruction of European Jewry>

Zusammenfassung: "Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." Primo Levi's words disclose a chilling truth: assigning blame to hideous political leaders, such as Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, is necessary but not sufficient to explain how the Holocaust could have happened. These leaders, in fact, relied on many thousands of ordinary men and women who made the Nazi machine work on a daily basis -- members of the killing squads, guards accompanying the trains to the extermination camps, civilian employees of the SS, the drivers of gas trucks, and the personnel of death factories such as Auschwitz. Why did these ordinary people collaborate and willingly become mass murderers? In Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers, Guenter Lewy tries to answer one of history's most disturbing questions. Lewy draws on a wealth of previously untapped sources, including letters and diaries of soldiers who served in Russia, the recollections of Jewish survivors, archival documents, and most importantly, the trial records of hundreds of Nazi functionaries. The result is a ghastly, extraordinarily detailed portrait of the Holocaust perpetrators, their mindset, and the motivations for their actions. Combining a rigorous historical analysis with psychological insight, the book explores the dynamics of participation in large-scale atrocities, offering a thought-provoking and timely reflection on individual responsibility for collective crimes. Lewy concludes that the perpetrators acted out of a variety of motives--a sense of duty, obedience to authority, thirst for career, and a blind faith in anti-Semitic ideology, among others. A witness to the 1938 Kristallnacht himself and the son of a concentration camp survivor, Lewy has searched for the reasons of the Holocaust out of far more than theoretical interest: it is a passionate attempt to illuminate a dismal chapter of his life -- and of human history -- that cannot be forgotten. -- Provided by publisher

Istv¾n De¾k is one of the world's most knowledgeable and clearheaded authorities on the Second World War, and for decades his commentary has been among the most illuminating and influential contributions to the vast discourse on the politics, history, and scholarship of the period. Writing chiefly for the New York Review of Books and the New Republic , De¾k has crafted review essays that cover the breadth and depth of the huge literature on this ominous moment in European history when the survival of democracy and human decency were at stake. ø Collected here for the first time, these articles chart changing reactions and analyses by the regimes and populations of Europe and reveal how postwar governments, historians, and ordinary citizens attempt to come to terms with?or to evade?the realities of the Holocaust, war, fascism, and resistance movements. They track the acts of scoundrels and the collusion of ordinary citizens in the so-called Final Solution but also show how others in authority and on the street heroically opposed the evil of the day. With its depth, conciseness, and interpretive power, this collection allows readers to consider more clearly and completely than ever before what has been said, how thought has shifted, and what we have learned about these momentous, world-changing events.

A collection of articles, excerpts from books and articles, and review essays published previously, revised and updated for this edition. Partial contents:

Examines the role of the image of "Jewish criminality" in the rise of Nazism, in the Holocaust, and in the perception of Jews in postwar Germany. The conception of Jews as born criminals, and of Nazism as a force which rose to put an end to "lawlessness", occupied a larger role in Nazi anti-Jewish ideology and practices than has heretofore been acknowledged in the historiography of the Holocaust. Nazi racism as such was not sufficient to convince the German masses of the "Jewish danger": the centuries-long stereotype of the "Jewish criminal" influenced the population's internalization of Nazi dogma and served as a rationalization and excuse for Nazi anti-Jewish measures - from boycott to mass murder. However, it was the Nazi system itself that promoted criminality and moral corruption, both amongst the victims and the perpetrators. For instance, the Nazi-invented ghetto, in 1940-43, became a hotbed of criminality. Dwells on the Jewish police in the ghettos as a manifestaion of this moral decay. In the Nazi camps, it was the criminals who took the top positions in the prisoners' hierarchy. Focuses, in particular, on a shift in Nazi ideology in 1944-45: the attitude toward Zionism, which had been ambivalent before then, changed to a view of Zionism as a great danger and as the foremost enemy. The Nazis depicted Zionism as the greatest incarnation of Jewish criminality. The stereotype of Jews as criminals persisted in postwar Germany, and affected the perception of the DPs on the part of both the Germans and the U.S. Army.