The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

Overview

n June 1944, Freda Wineman and her family arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous Nazi concentration and death camp. After a cursory look from an SS doctor, Freda's life was spared and her mother was sent to the gas chambers. Freda only survived because the Allies won the war — the Nazis ultimately wanted every Jew to die. Her mother was one of millions who lost their lives because of a racist regime that believed that some human beings simply did not deserve to live — not because of what they had done, but because of who they were.

Laurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting the survivors and perpetrators of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. In this sweeping history, he combines this testimony with the latest academic research to investigate how history's greatest crime was possible. Rees argues that while hatred of the Jews was at the epicenter of Nazi thinking, we cannot fully understand the Holocaust without considering Nazi plans to kill millions of non-Jews as well. He also reveals that there was no single overarching blueprint for the Holocaust. Instead, a series of escalations compounded into the horror. Though Hitler was most responsible for what happened, the blame is widespread, Rees reminds us, and the effects are enduring.

The Holocaust: A New History is an accessible yet authoritative account of this terrible crime. A chronological, intensely readable narrative, this is a compelling exposition of humanity's darkest moment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541730076
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	07/24/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	560
Sales rank:	356,943
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Laurence Rees is an award-winning historian and documentary film maker, and author of Auschwitz, and Holocaust, both published by PublicAffairs. 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

"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.

"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, bestelling author of Stalingrad, Berlin, and The Second World War

"A masterpiece... Rees' best book yet" -Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of 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