The destruction of the National Socialist regime and Judaism in Europe

Hans Mommsen (1930-2015), one of the most respected modern German historians, provides a compact analysis of the events leading up to the Holocaust. He first describes the anti-Semitism under the Weimar Republic and the role anti-Semitism played in the rise of the NSDAP. He shows how the National Socialist regime radicalized the persecution of Jews to the point of complete disenfranchisement. And he asks why and under what circumstances the steps from the exclusion of Jews from German society to their extermination took place.