Holocaust by Peter Longerich, director of the Research Center for the Holocaust and Twentieth-Century History at the University of London, argues that Judenpolitik, or anti-Jewish policy, was at the center of the Nazis’ strategy to realize their utopian dream of a racially homogeneous national community, first in Germany and subsequently throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. To rid Europe of its Jews, states Longerich, was not only central to the whole National Socialist movement, but was what gave it its distinctiveness. Therefore, he says, it is pointless to select a single order for a Final Solution, but rather to understand that the escalation from persecution to genocide involved a highly complicated series of decisions that emanated from the Nazi leadership, but whose implementation was left to the interpretation, if not imagination, of the actual perpetrators.

Longerich notes that the reliability of those countries allied with the Nazis following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was determined by their participation in the mass killings of Jews, or willingness to deport their Jews to the death camps.

Ever since the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin) in 1963, the role of the Judenräte, or Jewish councils, has been a subject of controversy. Did the councils in the ghettos make the deportation easier for the Nazis by implementing their demands for the roundup of Jews to be shipped to Treblinka and the other death camps? The charge of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis in their own demise, however, did not relate only to the Jewish councils.

The most controversial case of this kind was also part of the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961, charging that Rezso Kasztner, one of the leaders of the Zionist Vaad council in Hungary, had betrayed Hungarian Jewry by not warning them that the Nazis were bent on deporting them to Auschwitz.

Others, however, view Kasztner as a hero who saved 1,620 Jews by bargaining with Nazis, such as Eichmann and Kurt Becher, as part of a larger plan to trade money and goods to the Nazis for the lives of Hungarian Jews. Such negotiation, however, was doomed to fail because the Allies were bent on the policy of unconditional surrender, which excluded the possibility of bartering with the Nazis.

Kasztner remains a controversial figure, but Löb’s book should help rehabilitate his place among those who tried to save Hungarian Jewry.

Browning concludes his invaluable study by noting that the Jewish prisoners at Starachowice, rather than abandoning any notion of moral obligation to their fellow Jews, substituted a hierarchy of mutual obligation: first, loyalty to one’s own family members; secondly, obligations to friends and neighbors; thirdly, to one’s own townspeople; and, fourth, to Jews.

If anti-Semitism was the distinctive characteristic that propelled Nazi Germany, what was the attitude toward Jews in the Allied countries? Stephen Norwood looks at anti-Semitism in the United States in The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower and Anthony Julius examines it in Britain in his Trials of the Diaspora. The Norwood book chronicles the pro-Nazi attitudes on the part of administrators of the Ivy league colleges, elite women’s colleges and a number of Catholic universities, such as Notre Dame, between 1933 and 1940. More than just placing quotas against Jewish students, many top academic institutions displayed their pro-Nazi affinities by encouraging their students to visit Nazi Germany on exchange programs, refusing to hire Jewish refugee scholars fleeing Hitler and punishing both faculty and students who protested the school’s friendly relations with the Nazi regime. Norwood concludes that academic leaders such as James Conant of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University in New York embraced Nazi Germany partly because they associated Jews with Bolshevism and partly by viewing Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy as bulwarks against the spread of Communism.

Anthony Julius, best known in the United States as Deborah Lipstadt’s attorney in the David Irving libel suit, has written an indispensable history of anti-Semitism in England, and in his chapter on Great Britain’s response to the Holocaust finds that, although anti-Semitism was prevalent among a number of Great Britain’s elite, its policy toward aiding the Jews was based on a wartime strategy to do nothing that would impede victory over Nazi Germany, and that meant not diverting resources to any other end. This policy included refusing to bomb Auschwitz, because any such raid would represent a diversion of military equipment and personnel to nonmilitary purposes. Other officials made the argument that the Jews should not be treated as a special case, lest the British public conclude that the war was being fought on behalf of Jewish interests, thus increasing domestic anti-Semitism.

Great Britain’s worst nightmare, however, was that negotiating with the enemy on behalf of saving Jewish lives might lead the Nazis to allow millions of Jews to be free and demand entry to the one place that would accept them, Jewish Palestine. From the Evian Conference in 1938 to the White Paper of 1939 to the Bermuda Conference of 1943, this was always an unacceptable alternative, lest it alienate the Arabs. It was not only the Nazis, therefore, but also Allies, such as Great Britain, that prevented those, like Kasztner, from successfully negotiating the rescue of European Jewry. —Jack Fischel 

Jonathan Papernick had worked as a journalist in Israel, and those experiences, transformed into short stories, turned The Ascent of Eli (Arcade) into an impressive first collection. A novel, Who By Fire, Who By Blood (Exile Editions), followed in 2007, and Papernick soon joined the ranks of Dara Horn, Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer as a young Jewish writer worth watching.