For years now, the German historian Gotz Aly has been looking for causes. In densely documented book after book...he has sought 'to discern the utilitarian goals behind the murder of the European Jews.' Aly is an earnest, tireless compiler of the often arcane or overlooked, yet there is something raw, never quite finished, if always usefully suggestive, in his approach ... Even with regard to Germany, Aly never manages to capture Nazism’s all-encompassing anti-Jewish hatred ... Rarely in Aly’s work does one find more than history’s unadorned bricks, which seem insufficient in explicating the underpinnings of the horror ... Still, Aly has a masterly command of the facts of the Nazi catastrophe, its bricks and mortar amassed in all their mountainous detail. And the details he captures are all the more crucial because they are generally inaccessible in secondary sources elsewhere ... Aly’s reminder of the usefulness of taking a close look at the quiet horrors of Europe’s interwar years thus, despite the shortcomings of his new book, feels all the more valuable today. And his acknowledgment that comparisons between now and then — once the province of the ill-informed — deserve more serious attention from historians and others is just one of many reminders as to how far we’ve stumbled into an age of troubled sleep.

In this sweeping and persuasive study, German historian Aly...investigates how and why 'the architects of genocide were able to find support for the Final Solution in nearly all of the countries occupied by or allied with Germany' ... Aly packs this dense account with statistics and analysis, making a convincing case that “the pace and extent” of the genocide could not have been achieved without widespread cooperation. This expertly researched account is destined to influence future histories of the Holocaust.

The award-winning German author dips into his vast archive of resources to produce a major work on anti-Semitism ... The author ranges widely across Europe, examining Russia, Romania, France, and Greece as well as Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and other less-explored locales ... Though the gruesome subject and detail are sometimes tough to swallow, readers should forge ahead, relishing the author’s incredible research and singular scholarship ... Aly delivers again, this time expanding his lens outside of Germany to offer further revelations about the Holocaust.