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The Royal United Services Institute of New South Wales Incorporated
The Years of Extermination - Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945
By: Saul Friedlander (432/360480)
Publisher: Phoenix Press ISBN: 9780753824450
‘We only have illusions that something will change; this hope keeps us alive. But how long can we live on the power of the spirit that is also fading?’
Piecing together a choir of voices – personal testaments, diaries, letters and memoirs of victims, perpetrators and bystanders – The Years of Extermination explores and interprets the history of the Holocaust within the context of European politics and racial attitudes.
Shocking yet often poignant, Friedlander’s victims’-eye view uncovers the full horror of this most systematic and sustained of genocides, made possible not only by German policies and measures, but by submissive political and spiritual authorities, and the passive and inactive peoples of occupied Europe.
As the narrative charts the formulation of the Final Solution, it can be difficult to comprehend it all, yet Friedlander’s seminal and definitive work provides insight and understanding in the shadow of six million senseless deaths.
March 2009
