Hitler and the Holocaust (Modern Library Chronicles) - Softcover

Wistrich, Robert S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812968638 ISBN 13: 9780812968637

Publisher: Modern Library, 2003

Synopsis

Hitler and the Holocaust is the product of a lifetime’s work by one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of anti-Semitism and modern Jewry. Robert S. Wistrich examines Europe’s long history of violence against its Jewish populations, looks at the forces that shaped Hitler’s belief in a “satanic Jewish power” that must be eradicated, and discusses the process by which Hitler gained power and finalized his plans for mass genocide. He concludes by addressing the abiding legacy of the Holocaust and the lessons that can be drawn from it. Combining a comprehensive picture of one of the most cataclysmic periods in recent history with contemporary scholarly developments and fresh historical inquiry, Hitler and the Holocaust is an indelible contribution to the literature of history.

About this title

Review:

In Hitler and the Holocaust, part of the Modern Library Chronicles series, Robert S. Wistrich is less concerned with detailing the "what" and "how" of this century's most infamous genocide than he is in answering the seemingly unanswerable: "Why?"

World War II, Wistrich posits, was not only a German attempt to obtain territorial hegemony but simultaneously (and perhaps more importantly, in Hitler's eyes) a crusade against the "mythical Jewish enemy," those people he felt were the source of "all evils"--internationalism, pacifism, democracy, Marxism, and Christianity among them. Jews were nonpeople--vermin, bacteria, a contagion--and therefore "unworthy of life." This ideology was most immediately a reaction to Germany's defeat in World War I and the economic chaos and national humiliation that followed, but Wistrich suggests, this "apocalyptic theology" was only the ghastly tip of an anti-Jewish iceberg that had floated on European seas for the best part of two millennia. The Nazi agenda was aided and abetted, Wistrich goes on, as much by the indifference toward and abandonment of the Jews by most European Christian religious bodies (both Roman Catholic and Protestant) and American and British political exigencies as it was by modern technology.

This is a grave, dense book, one almost entirely unrelieved by anecdote. It is, as well, rigorous, adamant, and sure to generate controversy. Though it catalogues many individual trees, many of them difficult to behold, its primary value is to look upon the entire Holocaust forest and to describe that disturbing, grotesque panorama in eschatological terms. --H. O'Billovitch

From the Back Cover:

“Many historians have written about the Holocaust, but few have produced as fine a volume as Wistrich’s.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Robert Wistrich’s Hitler and the Holocaust is a concise yet distinctly authoritative history of the Holocaust. . . . Anyone who wants to read one book on the state of our understanding of Hitler and the Holocaust as we enter the new century would be well advised to begin with Wistrich. Never polemical and always meticulous, restrained in his prose and fair in his analysis, once again he displays a mastery of his subject and full command of even the most recent of scholarship.” —Michael Berenbaum, author of The World Must Know, former director of the Research Institute of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and former president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation

About this edition

• Publisher: Modern Library
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0812968638
• ISBN 13: 9780812968637
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320