When first the concept of differentness has taken deep roots, all the incomprehensible becomes possible. This is the history of the complicated process that led to a genocide. It is about human beings, because it is human beings that kill other human beings - or let them get killed. And it is human beings who can prevent that murder and genocide from happening. Its topic is therefore very concrete, but its scope is universal, because many of the phenomena it uncovers unfortunately are not specific to the process that led to the Holocaust.
Human beings act out of their images of others.
Other genocides in our century demonstrate, unsettlingly, how it is possible for cynical men with power to create an image of the enemy that enables human beings to believe that they are doing something good for society by killing other human beings - just because the victims are claimed to be different. It was Adolf Hitler who decided to kill all European Jews, but he never did it himself. He left it to others who again left it to others to do the killing. A decisive premise for why this could happen was the deep anchoring of anti-Semitism in European cultural thinking, and an equally important premise was the trauma of the lost World War I, which he had in common with the rest of German society. A third central premise was the character of Adolf Hitler's individual trauma that made him believe that Foresight had chosen him to create a new society on the ruins of the old, which had disintegrated with the fall of the Kaiserreich.