Recommended Reading

WHY did a great nation like Germany elevate the scum of its own people to power, and then follow them into the abyss? Few questions in the history of the past century have been more thoroughly explored or contentiously debated. An astonishing memoir, written decades ago and only now making its appearance, freshly illuminates this gnawing enigma.

Explores Heinrich Himmler's master plan for Europe and how the half a million Europeans and more than a million Soviet citizens who fought for the Third Reich were part of this plan.

This book tells the story of the small French village of Le Chambon and how they saved 5,000 Jews and other refugees during the Holocaust.

It would be almost too obvious to say that this is a timely book. With the resurgence of overt antisemitism in recent years—not least the online proliferation of "cultural Marxist" as a thinly veiled alt-right slur—Paul Hanebrink's excavation of the Jews-as-communists myth arrives at a grimly appropriate time. Primarily focused on East Central Europe while also pulling in material from across the continent, the result is an engaged and sophisticated genealogy of one specific strand of antisemitic paranoia. As the book adeptly illustrates, the assumption that communism was a Jewish plot was "a core ele­ment of counterrevolutionary, antidemo­cratic, and racist ideologies in many dif­ferent countries" (p. 4). Thus, apprehending the myth of "Judeo-Bolshevism" is necessary for understanding the nature of Far-Right politics in both the past and present.

In this clearly written, cogently argued and researched book, eminent historian Peter Hayes challenged the widely held assertion that the Holocaust is unfathomable and inexplicable.

Divided into five thematic sections, this handbook draws on the work of forty-seven Holocaust scholars.