Many historians view the Holocaust as a consequence or by-product of the horrific brutality that occurred in World War II. This volume contends the opposite: that the war was a direct result, not the cause, of Hitler's racial persecution and genocidal programme. When Nazis confiscated Jewish bank accounts and businesses, for example, those assets were used to finance Germany's rearmament. Toward the end of the war, when Germany desperately needed trains for the war effort, Hitler instead used the railroads to ship Jews to their death, at great expense to the military. World War II acted as a...

In Hitler's Shadow War, World War II scholar Donald M. McKale contends that the persecution and murder of the Jews, Slavs, and other groups was Hitler's primary effort during the war, not the conquest of Europe. According to McKale, Hitler and the Nazi leadership used the military campaigns of the war as a cover for a genocidal program that centered on the Final Solution. Hitler continued to commit extensive manpower and materials to this "shadow war" even when Germany was losing the battles of the war's closing years.

This deeply researched and informative book traces the biographies of thirty "typical" perpetrators of the Holocaust--some well known, some obscure--who survived World War II. Donald M. McKale reveals the shocking reality that the perpetrators were only rarely, if ever, tried or punished for their crimes, and nearly all alleged their innocence in Germany's extermination of nearly six million European Jews during the war. He highlights the bitter contrasts between the comfortable postwar lives of many war criminals and the enduring suffering of their victims. The author shows how immediately...