Hitler and the Holocaust (Modern Library Chronicles)
InHitler 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--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.