THE HITLER YEARS

The painful details.

Third Reich scholar McDonough, author of The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler’s Secret Police, completes his four-volume history of Germany from 1918 to 1945 with this year-by-year narrative of the Holocaust. When the Nazis took power in 1933, 525,000 native-born Jews lived in Germany, numbering 0.76% of the population. Most Germans had little contact with Jews and didn’t participate in the nationwide wave of assault, vandalism, and humiliation by Nazi activists that followed. International outrage over the attacks was dismissed by Nazi officials who maintained that Jews controlled the media. Violence and anti-Jewish laws began immediately but became genocidal only after war began. Ninety-five percent of all Jewish murders occurred after Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Many were murdered in extermination camps, of course, but many also died of starvation, disease, or overwork or were shot in face-to-face massacres. McDonough excels in research, and he delivers a steady stream of facts on anti-Jewish legislation, increasingly violent persecution, planning, construction, and operation of major camps, biographies of staff and victims, and consequences, if any. Some high- and low-level Nazis involved in the Holocaust were punished after the war; most weren’t. About 80% of Jews under Nazi control were murdered. Most Germans looked the other way. Most citizens of the democracies disapproved of Nazi mistreatment but refused to help. Although happy to welcome Albert Einstein and other celebrities, most Americans opposed accepting refugees who were fleeing Nazism. Allied leaders learned of the mass murders in 1942, but none took action. Although “Nazi” remains a reviled word everywhere, the 21st century has seen an embrace of leaders who owe their success to the belief that outsiders are “poisoning” their nations. McDonough reminds readers that Hitler’s policy during the 1930s was not to murder Jews but to deport them.

Ghastly history, well told.