The Cambridge History of the Holocaust: Volume 2, Perpetrating the Holocaust: Policies, Participants, Places

"This volume in the Cambridge History of the Holocaust focuses on perpetration and complicity in the Holocaust. Every aspect of this undertaking is contentious, starting with the illusion often associated with comprehensive histories such as this one that it is "definitive," as if its topic has been exhaustively researched to leave no question unanswered. Nothing could be further from the truth. The very term "Holocaust," which came into widespread usage only from the late 1970s, itself constructs an all-embracing concept encompassing a great variety of disparate events across Nazi-dominated Europe: face-to-face shootings along the Eastern Front; gassing in the notorious death camps in occupied Poland; deaths from disease, starvation, and brutality in the course of expropriation, ghettoization, economic exploitation, and the final death marches; and it can also, on some views, be extended back to encompass persecution before the atrocities accompanying the outbreak of war in 1939 or the switch to policies of extermination in 1941"--