Books
A timely reminder for all those anti-Israel hysterics: this is what genocide looks like
Robert Low welcomes a robust history of the Holocaust in an era in which the facts are under threat
January 23, 2026 09:37
Robert Low welcomes a robust history of the Holocaust in an era in which the facts are under threat
January 23, 2026 09:37Britain has a proud record of Holocaust historians: Martin Gilbert, David Cesarani and Laurence Rees spring to mind, and there are many other writers and academics who have studied and written about aspects of the Shoah. To their number we should add Frank McDonough, formerly professor of international history at Liverpool John Moores University and a specialist in 20th-century Germany.
His new book completes a four-volume history of Germany from 1918 to the end of the Second World War in 1945. Two volumes deal with Hitler’s rise and fall and a “prequel”, as he calls it, with the Weimar Republic. This final volume deals with the Holocaust, from Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 to his death and the collapse of the Nazi empire.
It makes sense to devote a separate volume to the Shoah because Hitler’s policy of exterminating the Jewish people wasn’t just a part of his political philosophy but a central, perhaps the central, plank in it. As McDonough shows, even in his final months, with defeat by then inevitable, Hitler was still blaming the Jews for causing the war in the first place.
McDonough’s technique is chronological, devoting a chapter to each year, which makes the narrative easy to follow, aided by his brisk, uncomplicated style and thorough research. A glance through his sources shows that this is not an original work, but he has assiduously combed through previous histories, memoirs, newspapers and many other resources to provide a readable account of history’s most awful crime.
It is salutary to see how swiftly Hitler’s violent antisemitism became reality on the streets as within two months of his accession to the chancellorship in January 1933 the Brown Shirts had launched their campaign of terror against Jews and Jewish shops and institutions. This did not go unnoticed abroad, thanks to courageous reporting by foreign correspondents. An estimated million Americans marched in protest throughout April, while in Britain many letter writers to the Jewish Chronicle demanded a boycott of German goods and there were demonstrations in the East End of London where 100,000 Jews lived.
Hitler, of course, took no notice. For him, it was just one more demonstration of malign Jewish influence. In an eery precursor of an issue that persists today, in May 1933 stormtroopers and right-wing students raided the pioneering Institute of Sex Science, headed by a Jew, Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, and looted its 20,000 books on homosexuality and transgender issues, most of which ended up in flames in the Nazis’ first, but not last, big book burning.
McDonough chronicles the incessant tightening of the Nazi grip on Germany’s Jews throughout the 1930s, though many still hoped for the best. One schoolgirl wrote later: “Focusing on their repulsive and obnoxious qualities, we failed to sense how dangerous the Nazis really were.” Life had become intolerable by the end of the decade but between November 1938 and September 1939 a further 229 anti-Jewish laws were still introduced.
As Hitler prepared to invade Poland, his government embarked on what McDonough terms a “quiet genocide” which was the first step on the road that led to Auschwitz: the compulsory euthanasia of people of all ages with physical and mental defects, known as the T4 project after the Berlin address, Tiergartenstrasse 4, from where it was organised. It was estimated that some 70,000 were killed in this way but recent evidence puts the figure as high as 300,000.
The importance of the T4 programme was that it developed the killing techniques that were soon to be used on an even larger scale on Europe’s Jews, notably the use of gas chambers that the victims were told were shower facilities. “It shows how it was possible for a state to administer mass murder in a secretive, planned, organised manner,” writes McDonough.
The rest of the book is largely devoted to an account of how that programme expanded to murder six million Jews over the next six years. The details are by now horribly familiar through countless books, documentaries, movies, Holocaust museums and visits to the death camps, yet still they chill the reader.
So is this book really necessary? Emphatically yes. In a new era of Holocaust denial, any new history is welcome. And to those anti-Israel hysterics screaming their poisonous message on our streets and campuses, I would merely say one thing: this is what a genocide really looks like.
The Hitler Years:Holocaust 1933-1945
By Frank McDonough
Head of Zeus
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