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unpublished sources Aly traces the sequence of events that made persecution of Jews an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.
