For what reasons did the Nazis decide to exterminate an entire people?
Why did they send millions of men, women, and children to concentration camps, shove them into gas chambers, hang them, shoot them, starve them, bludgeon them to death—destroying them in every imaginable and unimaginable way? What place does this genocide occupy among all the horrors committed by the Nazis?
I have pondered these questions for 25 years while creating television documentaries about Nazism and World War II.
In the course of this work, I have visited many countries, met with hundreds of eyewitnesses to those events—those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, those who observed it from the sidelines, and those who committed these crimes. Among the materials collected for my films, only a small portion was known previously.
The Holocaust is the most monstrous crime in the history of humanity.
We need to understand how such monstrosity became possible.
And this book, created not only based on new materials but also relying on recent research and documents from that time, is my attempt to do this."
