The Holocaust

A New History

Doris Bergen

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780752449289
  9780752445908
• eBook ISBN:
  9780752469393
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, but this is only half the story. Doris Bergen reveals how the Holocaust extended beyond the Jews to engulf millions of other victims in related programmes of mass murder. The Nazi killing machine began with the disabled, and went on to target Afro-Germans, Gypsies, non-Jewish Poles, French African soldiers, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexual men and Jehovah's Witnesses. As Nazi Germany conquered more territories and peoples, Hitler's war turned soldiers, police officers and doctors into trained killers, creating a veneer of legitimacy around vicious acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Using the testimonies of both survivors and eyewitnesses, as well as a wealth of rarely seen photographs, Doris Bergen shows the true extent of the catastrophe that overwhelmed Europe during the Second World War, in a gripping story of the lives and deaths of real people.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: Race and Space
• 1 Preconditions: Antisemitism, Racism and Common Prejudices in Early Twentieth-Century Europe
• 2 Leadership and Will: Adolf Hitler, the NSDAP and Nazi Ideology
• 3 From Revolution to Routine: Nazi Germany, 1933–1938
• 4 Open Aggression: In Search of War, 1938–1939
• 5 Experiments in Brutality: War Against Poland and the So-called Euthanasia Programme, 1939–1940
• 6 Expansion and Systematisation: Exporting War and Terror, 1940–1941
• 7 The Peak Years of Killing: 1942 and 1943
• 8 Death Throes and Killing Frenzies, 1944–1945
• Epilogue: The Legacies of Atrocity
• Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading
• List of Illustrations
• Picture Section