This book assumes that the Holocaust represents a very important event in modern history, not just for Jews and Germans, but for all thinking people who care about human behavior, human nature, and the future of human society. The German murder of approximately six million Jews and five million other victims of the Holocaust (besides tens of millions dead in World War II) certainly represents a low point in human history, the details of which are unusually horrific. From mass death in gas chambers to medical experiments with human subjects, from bullets in the brains of children to beards of old rabbis pulled out at the roots, we are left with stories that make us wonder how human beings could have been so cold and so brutal. We are also left with the pledge expressed by many survivors, “never again,” as well as the reality that genocide hashappened again, more than once, since the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust. This is a depressing topic, especially when we search out the trail of death from the beginning of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Despite the depressing nature of the material, this book also assumes that the Holocaust emphatically deserves our attention. The more we know about the Holocaust, the more we might be sensitized to the horror of genocidal actions or threats in our own day. Through the Nuremberg Trials, the United Nations, and the International Criminal Court, the world has expressed its condemnation of war crimes and of crimes against humanity. This type of response to the Holocaust, although sometimes tepid and ineffectual, might offer hope for the future. More importantly, perhaps, greater awareness of the Holocaust can provide a warning set of measurements by which to consider our own actions and inclinations, whether as individuals, as nations, or as members of an international community. It is very easy to view the Holocaust as an event and a set of behaviors completely outside our reality. However, the best historical inquiry draws us closer to the complexity of the past and makes it harder for us to dismiss other peoples and ages as totally “other.”