ABSTRACT
This book is about an encounter between two sets of human beings: on one hand the people who acted on behalf of the German state, its agencies, or its almost 66 million citizens between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945; on the other the almost 9 million Jews who lived in Germany, in twenty-one other European countries (Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hung ary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, the USSR, and Yugoslavia), and in the French and Italian colonial territories (Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia) that were either ruled directly or occupied by Germany or that made a formal alliance with it at any time during that interval. That encounter resulted in the death of about two-thirds of the latter group, in the large majority of cases as a direct result of actions taken by the former.
