The Years of Extermination

“Establishes itself as the standard historical work on Nazi Germany’s mass murder of Europe’s Jews . . . A masterpiece that will endure.” —The New York Times Book Review

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

The Years of Extermination, the completion of Saul Friedländer's major historical opus on Nazi Germany and the Jews, explores the convergence of the various aspects of the Holocaust, the most systematic and sustained of modern genocides.

The enactment of the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews depended upon many factors, including the cooperation of local authorities and police departments, and the passivity of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. Necessary also was the victims' willingness to submit, often with the hope of surviving long enough to escape the German vise.

In this unparalleled work—based on a vast array of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices from diaries, letters, and memoirs—the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive representation.

“Saul Friedlander’s massive history of the Holocaust is a judicious, authoritative and restrained study. But it’s also a stark reminder that lunacy may have been as much a part of Nazism as cruelty.” —Newsweek

“One of the most important works of historical writing in recent years, and deserves to live in the company of works by Raul Hilberg, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Leni Yahil as one of the finest comprehensive studies of this darkest subject of all.” —The New Republic