Research Catalog

How could this happen : explaining the Holocaust / Dan McMillan.

Title: How could this happen : explaining the Holocaust / Dan McMillan.
Author: McMillan, Dan, Ph.D.
Publication: New York : Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group, [2014]

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	D804.3 .M398 2014	Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xi, 276 pages; 24 cm

Summary

"The Holocaust has long seemed incomprehensible, a monumental crime that beggars our powers of description and explanation. Historians have probed the many sources of this tragedy, but no account has united the various causes into an overarching synthesis that answers the vital question: How was such a nightmare possible in the heart of Western civilization? In How Could This Happen, historian Dan McMillan distills the vast body of Holocaust research into a cogent explanation and comprehensive analysis of the genocide's many causes, revealing how a once-progressive society like Germany could have carried out this crime. The Holocaust, he explains, was caused not by one but by a combination of factors--from Germany's failure to become a democracy until 1918, to the widespread acceptance of anti-Semitism and scientific racism, to the effects of World War I, which intensified political divisions within the country and drastically lowered the value of human life in the minds of an entire generation. Masterfully synthesizing the myriad causes that led Germany to disaster, McMillan shows why thousands of Germans carried out the genocide while millions watched, with cold indifference, as it enveloped their homeland. Persuasive and compelling, How Could This Happen explains how a perfect storm of bleak circumstances, malevolent ideas, and damaged personalities unleashed history's most terrifying atrocity"--

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

committed to retain

Contents

Posing the question -- A genocide like no other -- Why Germany? -- A world of enemies -- Hardened by war -- Division and disaster -- Why Hitler? -- From dictator to demigod -- Why the Jewish people? -- Hatred as science -- The absent moral compass -- What they knew.

ISBN

9780465080243 (hardback)
0465080243 (hardback)
0465036643
9780465036646
9780465036646 (ebook) (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

^^2013051212

OCLC

842877138
SCSB-11159393

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library