By the way, if anyone is truly interested in learning about the hows & whys leading up to the Holocaust, I doubt if you can do better than this book:
Browning: The Origins of the Final Solution
The copyright is 2004, and that's when I read it. But I marked it well, and it wouldn't take long to dig out some of the more interesting information.
Browning is a great scholar. Not to be missed is his “Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution.”
I also recommend the following sources:
“The Extermination of the East European Jews” by Raoul Hilberg.
“The Diary of Adam Czerniakow.” [An engineer who was forced to become the chairman of the Warsaw ghetto’s “judenrat”, the so-called self-governing body of Jews within the ghetto. His job was to be the intermediary between the imprisoned Jews and the Nazi authorities. He committed suicide the day the transport trains came to empty the ghetto and move the Jews “east”, supposedly to camps where they were told they would find “employment.”]
“The Diary of Emanuel Ringelblum.” [Diary of a Swiss journalist who sought firsthand experience of life within the Warsaw ghetto. He made it in and out once. On his second trip, he was caught and perished in the ghetto. He was able to bury the diary, which was found and published after the war.]
“Denying the Holocaust” and “Beyond Belief” by Deborah Lipstadt. [The first deals with David Irving and the Institute for Historical Review; the second deals with the thin treatment of the extermination program by the U.S. press.]
“Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People” by Max Weinreich [This is an especially instructive book. The universities in Germany at the time were the very first ones to jump on the Nazi bandwagon; they were all too happy to fire their Jewish colleagues, many of whom were department chairmen. This was as true of the hard sciences like physics as it was of soft ones like history and sociology. Most of the intellectual rationalization for extermination came from the biology departments of the universities, which had accepted a program of eugenics — and many of these eugenics theories had originally come to Germany from the United States.]
“Story of a Secret State” by Jan Karski [the wartime autobiography of a great Polish nobleman hero who became a courier for the Polish Underground. He was an eye-witness to the treatment of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and was able to travel to England (where the original Polish government found asylum) and report his findings. A long and very moving interview with Karski is featured in the 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust titled “Shoah” by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzman. After the war, I believe Karski becamse a professor of history at Georgetown University.]
“Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police.” [Verbatim transcripts of Eichman’s debriefing by police interrogators before his trial in Israel, with running commentary.]