This book attempts to answer 3 questions: How was it possible for a modern state to carry out the systematic murder of a people for no reason other than that they were Jewish? How did that people allow itself to be destroyed? and How could the world stand by without halting this destruction? Dawidowicz believes that W.W. II was the direct result of Hitler's antisemitism. In her view the Holocaust, far from being improvised during the war, was a carefully conceived plan, and the war was waged solely to allow the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Europe.