In the 1930s, the British public's emotional response to the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, including the bombing of Guernica, shaped the mass-politics of the age. Similarly, alleged German atrocities in World War I against the Belgians and the French had led to campaigns in Britain for donations to support the victims. Why then, was the British public seemingly less concerned with the treatment of Jews in Hitler's Germany? Outlining a 'hierarchy of compassion', Russell Wallis seeks to show how and why the Holocaust met initially with such a muted response in Britain. Drawing on primary source material, Wallis shows why the Nuremberg laws, Kristallnacht and the creation of the Prague Ghetto were reported without great protest. Even after the reality of the 'Final Solution' was revealed to the British Parliament by Anthony Eden in 1942, the Holocaust remained a footnote to the war effort. Britain, Germany and the Road to the Holocaust is a study of the British relationship with Germany in the period, and a dissection of British attitudes towards the genocide in Europe.

In the network of Nazi camps across wartime Europe, prisoner of war institutions were often located next to the slave camps for Jews and Slavs; so that British PoWs across occupied Europe, over 200,000 men, were witnesses to the holocaust. The majority of those incarcerated were aware of the camps, but their testimony has never been fully published. Here, using eye-witness accounts held by the Imperial War Museum, Russell Wallis rewrites the history of British prisoners and the Holocaust during the Second World War. He uncovers the histories of men such as Cyril Rofe, an Anglo-Jewish PoW who escaped from a work camp in Upper Silesia and fled eastwards towards the Russian lines, recounting his shattering experiences of the so-called 'bloodlands' of eastern Poland. Wallis also shows how and why the knowledge of those in the armed forces was never fully publicised, and how some PoW accounts were later exaggerated or fictionalised. British PoWs and the Holocaust will be an essential new oral history of the holocaust and an extraordinary insight into what was known and when about the greatest crime of the 20th century.

A revelation of the atrocities committed against European Jews by Hitler and the Nazis during World War II.

Examining the Nazi Holocaust and the U.S.-British strategic bombing of cities during World War II, Markusen and Kopf uncover some striking parallels between the two programs of governmental violence. Although there were important differences in the two cases, the authors show that ultimately democracies and totalitarian governments alike will resort to genocidal killing if it is perceived to be essential to national security. The authors suggest that the continuing reliance on nuclear weapons reflects similar psychological and social factors to those that facilitated the Holocaust and strategic bombing during World War II.

Pp. 17-31 describe the liberation of the eastern camps (mainly Majdanek and Auschwitz) by the Soviet army. Pp. 33-102 give details on the liberation of five other camps - Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Theresienstadt. Discusses policies of Nazi leaders and camp commandants between July 1944-May 1945 in view of the advancing Allied forces, the circumstances of the liberation of each camp, and their effect on American and European perceptions of the war. Pp. 121-136 contain three accounts, by survivors, of their liberation: Clara Greenbaum (Bergen-Belsen), Simon Wiesenthal (Mauthausen), and Elie Wiesel (Buchenwald).

This benchmark volume, which grew out of the inaugural conference of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, defines the state of knowledge about the Holocaust a half century after the event. The book provides a penetrating survey of what the most authoritative research has yielded and a guide for where future study of the Holocaust needs to go.