This landmark work answers two fundamental questions - how, and why, did the Holocaust happen?

Laurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting and interviewing survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Now, in his magnum opus, he combines this largely unpublished testimony with the latest academic research to create the first accessible and authoritative account of the Holocaust in over three decades. Rees argues that the Holocaust was not just about the Germans and not just about the Jews - although hatred of the Jews was always at the epicentre of Nazi thinking, the Nazis planned to kill millions of non-Jews as well - and shows how there was no single "decision" to start the Holocaust; instead it was a series of escalations that cumulatively created the horror.

Through a chronological, intensely readable narrative, featuring the latest historical research and compelling eyewitness testimony, this is the story of the worst crime in history.