The Nazi Holocaust haunts the modern imagination as one of the most compelling examples of the human capacity for organised atrocity on a mass scale. This authoritative account of the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy from 1939 to 1942 seeks to answer some of the fundamental questions about what actually happened, and why, between the outbreak of war and the emergence of the Final Solution. Christopher Browning assesses the historians' interpretations and offers his own insights, based on detailed case studies uncovering important and telling new evidence.
Preface; Part I. The Prelude to Genocide: 1. Nazi resettlement policy and the search for a solution to the Jewish question, 1939-1941; 2. Nazi ghettoization policy in Poland, 1939-41; Part II. Conflicting Explanations: 3. German technocrats, Jewish labor, and the Final Solution: a reply to Götz Aly and Susanne Heim; 4. The holocaust as by-product? A critique of Arno Mayer; 5. 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism': the decision for the Final Solution reconsidered; Part III. The Perpetrators: Accommodation, Anticipation, and Conformity: 6. Bureaucracy and mass murder: the German administrator's comprehension of the Final Solution; 7. Genocide and public health: German doctors and Polish Jews, 1939-1941; 8. One day in Józefów: initiation to mass murder; Index.
