A provocative and insightful analysis that sheds new light on one of the most puzzling and historically unsettling conundrums
Why did the Holocaust happen in Germany, of all places? How did a country known for its culture and refinement turn so rabidly anti-Semitic? Why did a nation where Jews had full civil rights and many opportunities--a place that Jews had eagerly flocked to in the early twentieth century to escape racist persecution in Poland and Russia--turn upon them so violently just a few decades later? Countless people have grappled with these questions, but few have come up with answers as original and perceptive as those of German historian G tz Aly. Tracing the prehistory of the Holocaust--from the 1800s to the Nazis' assumption of power in 1933--Aly shows that German anti-Semitism did not originate with racist ideology or religious animosity, as is often supposed. Instead, through striking statistics and economic analysis, he demonstrates that it was rooted in a more basic emotion: material envy.
Aly's groundbreaking account of this fatal social dynamic opens up a new vantage point on the greatest crime in history and is sure to prompt heated debate for years to come.
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