From the award-winning historian of the Holocaust, Europe Against the
Jews, 1880-1945 is the first book to move beyond Germany's singular
crime to the collaboration of Europe as a whole.
The Holocaust was perpetrated by the Germans, but it would not have been
possible without the assistance of thousands of helpers in other
countries: state officials, police, and civilians who eagerly supported
the genocide. If we are to fully understand how and why the Holocaust
happened, Götz Aly argues in this groundbreaking study, we must examine
its prehistory throughout Europe. We must look at countries as far-flung
as Romania and France, Russia and Greece, where, decades before the
Nazis came to power, a deadly combination of envy, competition,
nationalism, and social upheaval fueled a surge of anti-Semitism,
creating the preconditions for the deportations and murder to come.
In the late nineteenth century, new opportunities for education and
social advancement were opening up, and Jewish minorities took
particular advantage of them, leading to widespread resentment. At the
same time, newly created nation-states, especially in the east, were
striving for ethnic homogeneity and national renewal, goals which they
saw as inextricably linked. Drawing upon a wide range of previously
unpublished sources, Aly traces the sequence of events that made
persecution of Jews an increasingly acceptable European practice.
Ultimately, the German architects of genocide found support for the
Final Solution in nearly all the countries they occupied or were allied
with.
Without diminishing the guilt of German perpetrators, Aly documents the
involvement of all of Europe in the destruction of the Jews, once again
deepening our understanding of this most tormented history.
