This book explores the Holocaust as a social process. Although the mass murder of European Jews
was essentially the result of political-ideological decisions made by the Nazi state leadership
the events of the Holocaust were also part of a social dynamic. All European societies
experienced developments that led to the social exclusion persecution and murder of the
continent's Jews. This volume therefore questions Raul Hilberg¿s category of the 'bystander'.
In societies where the political order expects citizens to endorse the exclusion of particular
groups in the population there cannot be any completely uninvolved bystanders. Instead this
book examines the multifarious forms of social action and behaviour connected with the
Holocaust. It focuses on institutions and persons helpers co-perpetrators facilitators and
spectators beneficiaries and profiteers as well as Jewish victims and Jewish organisations
trying to cope with the dynamics of exclusion and persecution.
