This book offers a particular perspective on the destruction of the European Jews. It places the persecution of Jews in the context of interdependent policies regarding warfare, occupation and policing, social issues, economics, racist thought and popular racism. The study also describes the murder of Jews amidst massive violence against other groups and attempts to make connections among these different sorts of violence. This differs from narratives that examine the persecution and murder of Jews alone with little regard to the fate of other groups, on the basis of a history of ideas with relatively few other forms of contextualization. In addition, this book gives more prominence than many other works to the persecution of Jews by non-Germans and tries to provide a general analysis of this persecution across national boundaries.

This book's perspective is derived from a new approach to understanding mass violence that I have recently suggested. In brief, I find the prevailing explanations too state centered, too focused on the intents and plans of rulers and too concentrated on race and ethnicity as causes, and they are usually concerned with the persecution of one group that is treated in isolation from other victim groups. Historically, by contrast, various population groups in many countries were victims of massive physical violence in which diverse social groups, acting together with state organs, participated for a multitude of reasons. These three aspects – the participatory character of violence, multiple victim groups and multi-causality – were interconnected. Simply put, the occurrence and thrust of mass violence depends on broad and diverse support, but this support is based on a variety of motives and interests that cause violence to spread in different directions and in varying intensities and forms. In emphasizing that mass violence is based on complex participatory processes, I speak of extremely violent societies. These phenomena can be traced through many important historical cases of mass violence such as the Soviet Union from the 1930s through the 1950s, the late Ottoman Empire (including the destruction of the Armenians), Cambodia, Rwanda and North America in the nineteenth century.

The same traits – broad participation, multiple motives and several victim groups – can also be found in the violence of Germans and people from other nations during World War II.