The Holocaust

Book excerpt: This complete history incorporates the 'voices' of the Holocaust, not only the perspectives of the victims, but also the perpetrators and bystanders. Bergen reveals the common misunderstanding that the Holocaust was aimed solely at Jews. In actual fact the Holocaust claimed the lives of 12 million people and incorporated many different social and ethnic groups. The Nazi program of destruction not only focused on Jews, but the disabled, Gypsies, Poles, Soviet POWs, homosexual men, Afro-Germans and Jehovah's Witnesses. The Second World War enabled this carnage by conquering territories and people, turning soldiers and doctors into trained killers, and creating a veneer of legitimacy around vicious acts of 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide. Bergen's pathbreaking study uses cutting-edge and original research to reveal how these attacks were linked in a terrifying web of violence and brings to light the real extent of the most notorious and far reaching campaign of genocide in modern history.