ABSTRACT
The Holocaust might best be defined as the systematic destruction of Euro-pean Jews implemented by the National Socialist government in Germany and its allies during World War II. As a policy, it was known in Germany as the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”; the “question”—of what to be done with Jews living in the midst of non-Jewish cultures-had been around in Germany, as it had been in Europe and the Americas, for as long as Jews had lived there. That the Final Solution took place in Germany, the most industrially advanced country in Europe, raises a number of other questions, among them the relation between industrial society and anti-Semitism, German cultural understanding of non-Germans, and particularly of Jews, other countries’ and cultures’ apparent inaction in the face of the concentration and later the liquidation of Jews in Germany and German-occupied and -allied countries. But because the “Jewish question” to which a final solution had to be found-and which Hitler and those in the National Socialist government of Germany implemented-was at least a thousand years old, the question of where to begin a history of the Holocaust is a difficult one to answer.
