In Hitler's Shadow War, World War II scholar Donald M. McKale contends that the persecution and murder of the Jews, Slavs, and other groups was Hitler's primary effort during the war, not the conquest of Europe. According to McKale, Hitler and the Nazi leadership used the military campaigns of the war as a cover for a genocidal program that centered on the Final Solution. Hitler continued to commit extensive manpower and materials to this "shadow war" even when Germany was losing the battles of the war's closing years.
Donald McKale is the Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of Humanities in the history department at Clemson University and is the author of Hitler: The Survival Myth, The Nazi Party Courts, and War by Revolution: Germany and Great Britain in the Middle East in the Era of WWI. He lives in Clemson, South Carolina.
Table of Contents
Preface
ix
Abbreviations and Special Terms
xi
Introduction
1
1.
Germany and the Rise of Hitler
11
2.
The Nazi Revolution and German Jews, 1933
36
3.
The Revolution Ends? Between Anti-Jewish Violence and Legislation, 1933-1936
60
4.
Foreign Aggression and the "Jewish Question," 1936-1938
80
5.
The Final Steps to War and Intensification of Jewish Persecution, 1938-1939
97
6.
The Beginning of Racial War, 1939-1940
126
7.
Expanding the Racial War, 1940
159
8.
The Racial War in the East, 1941
182
9.
Repercussions of the War and Decision for the Final Solution
206
10.
The Killing Centers and Deportations of Polish Jewry, 1942
241
11.
Attempted Revolts, Auschwitz, and the Beginning Deportations of European Jewry, 1942
277
12.
Growing Jewish Resistance and Continued Deportations, 1943
308
13.
Expansion of Auschwitz, Allied Victories, and More Deportations, 1943-1944
330
14.
The Final Solution amid German Defeat, 1944-1945
364
15.
Bystanders: The World and the Holocaust, 1942-1944
387
16.
Rescue, Relief, and War Crimes Trials
408
17.
The Perpetrators: Types, Motives, and the Postwar Era
