Going beyond the fanatical anti-Semitism of Hitler and his chiefs, Schleunes analyzes "the internal structure of the [Nazi] regime, the role of its bureaucracies, and the rivalries between competing power groups ... to trace the early stages of discrimination against Jews and their exclusion from public life that led ultimately to their deaths."--p.vii.

Was the extermination of the Jews part of the Nazi plan from the very start? Arno Mayer offers astartling and compelling answer to this question, which is much debated among historians today.In doing so, he provides one of the most thorough and convincing explanations of how the genocidecame about in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, which provoked widespread interest and controversywhen first published. Mayer demonstrates that, while the Nazis’ anti-Semitism was always virulent, it did not becomegenocidal until well into the Second World War, when the failure of their massive, all-or-nothingcampaign against Russia triggered the Final Solution. He details the steps leading up to thisenormity, showing how the institutional and ideological frameworks that made it possible evolved,and how both related to the debacle in the Eastern theater. In this way, the Judeocide is placedwithin the larger context of European history, showing how similar ‘holy causes’ in the past havetriggered analogous – if far less cataclysmic – infamies.

The Loesener memoir offers a rare insider's view into the functioning of the Nazi system and Schleunes's essay provides an analysis of how Loesener's activities served to promote as well as hinder that functioning.

Pp. vii-xxxiii contain Friedländer's introduction, which did not appear in the original German edition.

Since the publication of Karl Schleunes' The Twisted Road To Auschwitz in 1970 an almost inconceivably broad variety of scholarly books and articles has dealt with why and how the Holocaust came into being and what kind of mechanisms lay at the bottom of the unimaginable cruelties committed by the Nazi regime against the Jews.

A bold, groundbreaking work that provides the definitive answer to the persistent question: Why didn't more Jews flee Nazi Europe?