Description: This book seeks to answer three vital questions about the worldwide response to Hitler's "Final Solution" When did information about the genocide first become known to Jews and non-Jews? Through what channels was this information transmitted? What was the reaction of those who received word of the slaughter?
Brief description:
Walter Laqueur was director of the Institute of Contemporary History in London and served as chairman of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington until 2000. He was founder and editor of the Journal of Contemporary History and other publications. Laqueur taught at Georgetown, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Brandeis University, and Tel Aviv University.
Review Quotes: "Laqueur makes it quite clear that everybody knew what was happening. Germany was a sieve, and information poured out in a flood for anyone who would listen, read, or ask questions. And 'everybody' included the Jews in Germany and in Eastern Europe as well as Jewish Leaders in the United States and Britain . . . [A]s Laqueur puts it, the victims-to-be didn't believe their fate-to-be." --Arnold Beichman, National Review "Laqueur has uncovered the reasons why contemporary reports on the 'Final Solution' were not believed . . . The level of analysis and sensitivity exhibited here make this work valuable to both scholars and the general reader." --Donald J. Dietrich, Library Journal "The Terrible Secret is not a study of the inadequate responses (relief and rescue efforts) by Western governments to the Final Solution. Laqueur by and large limits himself to how much was known and where the information came from . . . [M]ost readers will go away overwhelmed by the weight of his evidence that the outside world knew a good deal about the 'terrible secret' by December 1942, which is Laqueur's stopping point." --Richard Breitman, Central European History "[Laqueur] presses his facts to yield a single shocking point, and the result is close to a landmark study, not of the Holocaust directly but of the way in which people at every level of involvement responded to incoming information about the massacres and death camps . . . [Laqueur's] approach always has been to study a specific problem within definite limits, in this case the problem of determining 'who knew what and when. . . .' Very much like a detective novel, each chapter plays out the same drama, among the victims, among Germans, among the Allies, as we watch the gathering weight of evidence slowly overcome the will not to believe." --Terrence Des Pres, The New Republic
"The so-called 'Final Solution' was developed by Adolph Hitler and his Nazi advisors to justify the genocide of European Jews. One of the heart bre