Final Solution: The Fates Of The Jews 1933-49

An intelligent and thought-provoking new short history of the Holocaust. Not only does David Cesarani draw together and engage with the latest scholarly research, making extensive use of previously untapped resources such as diaries and letters from within the ghettoes and camps (many of them in Polish or Yiddish and therefore previously largely inaccessible to Anglo-American scholars) but by adopting a rigorously Judeocentric approach the whole narrative of the march to genocide and its aftermath the book presents a subtly different timeline which casts afresh the horror of the period and engenders a significant re-evaluation of the how and why.

Eschewing some of the more fevered theses about the guilt of the perpetrators (and indeed recasting how wide that net should be spread), David’s measured and skilful negotiation of a crowded field is, as a result, all the more devastating.