The book will draw together and engage with the latest scholarly research, make extensive use of diaries, letters, memoirs, letters, war crimes trials, including life in the ghettos and camps. The book presents a vivid and shocking narrative that is aimed at the general reader.
 
Bestselling historian, Professor Frank McDonough will tackle the subject in the same way as his brilliantly reviewed and bestselling titles in this series, offering the reader a sweeping narrative tackling the major characters, significant events of this horrific period of Nazi doctrine formed in their early years of the 1920s, that would evolve into full-blown genocide of a race of people by the end of World War Two.
 
The Hitler Years: Holocaust 1933 to 1945 describes in detail the development of early persecution formulated by Adolf Hitler from as far back as the early 1920s, placing in context what was to come once the Nazi Party gained power in 1933; the Nuremberg Laws to constrain the German-Jewish population. It covers the country’s slow slide into a pre-war policy of intimidation that would culminate in the murderous attacks on ‘Kristallnacht’ (the ‘Night of Broken Glass’). As Europe marched into another global conflict in 1939, tens of thousands of German Jews had fled the country only to be swept up as Hitler’s armies conquered all Western Europe. With the invasion of the Soviet Union, the secret meeting in early 1942 (the Wannsee Conference) would utilise the war in the east to plan in intricate detail the annihilation of Jewry on the continent – known to all now as the ‘Final Solution’.
 
A tragic and deadly period in German and European history brought to life by one of the country’s premier scholars.