Holocaust and European societies: social processes and social dynamics

Explores the Holocaust as a social process. Although the mass murder of European Jews was essentially the result of political-ideological decisions made by the Nazi state leadership the events of the Holocaust were also part of a social dynamic. Questions Raul Hilberg's category of the `bystander'. In societies where the political order expects citizens to endorse the exclusion of particular groups in the population, there cannot be any completely uninvolved bystanders. Instead, this book examines the multifarious forms of social action and behaviour connected with the Holocaust. It focuses on institutions and persons, helpers, co-perpetrators, facilitators and spectators, beneficiaries and profiteers, as well as Jewish victims and Jewish organisations trying to cope with the dynamics of exclusion and persecution.