Between 1933 and 1945, in the heart of what called itself the most civilized continent on earth, the German state and its collaborators set out to erase the Jewish people from the face of Europe. By the time it was over, some six million Jewish men, women, and children had been murdered – shot at the edge of pits, starved behind ghetto walls, worked to death, or killed in the gas chambers of camps built for no other purpose. Millions of others – Roma, the disabled, Soviet prisoners, and the persecuted – were destroyed alongside them.

This is the whole story in a single volume: the long history of hatred that made it thinkable; the Nazi rise to power and the step-by-step stripping of a people’s rights, property, and safety; the ghettos and the mobile killing squads; the Wannsee Conference and the machinery of the “Final Solution”; the death camps of occupied Poland; the genocide as it unfolded country by country across Europe; and the courage of those who resisted and those who rescued.

Clear-eyed, deeply humane, and honest about what we know and what remains disputed, this is an unforgettable account of how the unthinkable was made real – and of why, four generations on, we are still bound to remember.